The PA-500 Series (PA-560 and PA-520) is designed to handle today’s AI-heavy, API-driven, and encrypted traffic patterns without forcing you to compromise on security.

In the Miercom independent test, both appliances were evaluated with realistic traffic, including:

• AI workflows such as text generation APIs, multimodal tasks, coding assistants, and search/knowledge platforms
• API-heavy, short-burst, chained requests with high concurrency
• Encrypted traffic using TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 (important, as more than 70% of enterprise traffic is encrypted)

Key observations:

• AI traffic readiness: The PA-560 delivered 2x to over 8x the AI replay throughput of the comparable Fortinet FG-201G across demanding workloads such as Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, and OpenAI Playground. The PA-520 outperformed the FG-71G in every AI test scenario.
• Encrypted traffic performance: Across TLS 1.2 and 1.3 decryption tests, Palo Alto Networks platforms consistently sustained higher throughput than equivalent Fortinet models while keeping security policies fully enabled.
• Stability under load: Under intense AI traffic, the PA-560 and PA-520 maintained stable operation and effective memory use. By contrast, the Fortinet FG-201G repeatedly entered memory Conserve Mode and failed specific AI and connection-capacity tests.

In practical terms, this means you can inspect and secure AI and API traffic—even when it’s encrypted—while keeping user experience responsive and predictable.

The Miercom report highlights both performance and cost benefits for the PA-500 Series when compared with Fortinet appliances of similar class.

Throughput with security services enabled (realistic production setting):

• PA-560 vs. FG-201G
  • Average throughput advantage: 86.2% higher
  • Cost efficiency: PA-560 throughput is 1.9x better than FG-201G
• PA-520 vs. FG-71G
  • Average throughput advantage: 150% higher
  • Cost efficiency: PA-520 throughput is 2.5x better than FG-71G

TCO per protected Mbps (with security bundles enabled):

• PA-560
  • TCO is 1.6x better than FG-201G
  • Approximately 32% more cost-efficient per stable Mbps
• PA-520
  • TCO is 1.7x better than FG-71G
  • Approximately 70% more cost-efficient per stable Mbps

These numbers are based on testing with core security services turned on (e.g., Threat Prevention, Advanced URL Filtering, Advanced DNS Security, WildFire, and TLS/SSL decryption for Palo Alto Networks; Antivirus, IPS, Web/URL filter, file/email filter, and decryption for Fortinet), reflecting how organizations actually deploy NGFWs.

For planning, the takeaway is that the PA-500 Series provides higher protected throughput and a lower cost per Mbps, which directly impacts long-term TCO—especially as AI and encrypted traffic volumes continue to grow.

As AI use grows—along with machine-to-machine API calls, agent-based features, and heavy encryption—firewalls are stressed in new ways. It’s not just about peak throughput anymore; it’s about how the platform behaves under continuous, complex load.

The Miercom tests underline three architectural points:

1. Stability under AI-driven load
   AI workflows generate short bursts, chained requests, and high concurrency. Under these conditions:
   • The PA-560 and PA-520 maintained uninterrupted operational stability across all AI tests.
   • The Fortinet FG-201G repeatedly entered memory-induced Conserve Mode during DeepSeekAI traffic and during maximum connections-per-second and maximum concurrent-connection tests, hitting memory exhaustion before CPU was fully used.

   This indicates that the PA-500 Series can sustain modern, security-intensive AI workloads without unexpected degradation.

2. Security-by-default design
   All devices were tested with security services enabled to reflect real deployments. For Palo Alto Networks, this included Threat Prevention (antivirus, vulnerability protection, anti-spyware, data filtering), basic file blocking, Advanced URL Filtering, Advanced DNS Security, WildFire, and TLS/SSL decryption. The PA-500 Series showed minimal performance degradation when services were turned on compared to baseline, which is important if you want to avoid turning features off just to keep performance acceptable.
3. Application and protocol diversity
   The test environment included not just web traffic but also SIP, MSSQL, FIX, RDP, SMBv2, and FTP—protocols that mimic a real enterprise setting.
   • Palo Alto Networks platforms maintained throughput across this mix.
   • Fortinet devices showed severe throughput drops and in some cases failed to process certain critical protocols (for example, FIX).

For organizations, this means the PA-500 Series helps you reimagine perimeter security for the AI era: it can inspect encrypted, AI-driven, and specialized application traffic with security fully enabled, while keeping the environment stable and predictable as demand scales.