SonicWALL vs. FortiNet - Need advice

[Solema]

Hi All,
My company works almost exclusively with SonicWALLs, but we have a few clients with Cisco ASAs and one new client with a FortiNet FortiGate 80C.

The FortiNet client's firewall services are up for renewal, and I was looking at replacing their device with a pair of SonicWALL NSA 240's in HA.

Has anyone used both that can provide some opinions on how these two devices compare? I don't want the client to lose any significant functionality moving to the NSA 240, and I don't know much about FortiGates.

How are the IPS, Content Filtering, and Antivirus/Antispam services between the two? Are they comparable to eachother, or is one significantly better than the other?

If the devices are about equal in terms of efffectiveness and performance then I will get them onto the NSA's, but if the 80C is significantly better I'll just stick with renewing their services.

Thanks for your help!

Nick

 

[theevilsharpie]

I haven't used the NSA 240, but a comparison between the two here...

http://www.sonicguard.com/NSA-240.asp
http://www.avfirewalls.com/FortiGate-80C.asp

... shows that it is the faster firewall. I can't speak for the feature difference between the two, but I've been using exclusively FortiGate and have never felt bottlenecked by performance or limited in functionality, the latter being one of my complained with SonicWALL's lower-end TZ line.

 

[Solema]

So should I move them to the NSA then?

 

[drebo]

SonicWalls are aweful. I recommend anyone with them move away from them ASAP. They're not worth the plastic they're made out of.

 

[Cable God]

Sonicwall.... ugh.... Charles Barkley put it best: "That's turruble..."

Fortinet beats the heck out of Sonicwall IMHO. Juniper SRX is even better.

 

[melchoir]

I have no sonicwall experience, but plenty of Fortinet experience. I'm not a fan and based on these experiences will not entertain the thought of purchasing a Fortinet firewall when my current firewall is retired in about a year.

Most of my experience with Fortinet is on a Fortigate 5000 series appliance, and some is on a SOHO sized Fortigate-60B appliance.

 

[theevilsharpie]

I have no sonicwall experience, but plenty of Fortinet experience. I'm not a fan and based on these experiences will not entertain the thought of purchasing a Fortinet firewall when my current firewall is retired in about a year.

Most of my experience with Fortinet is on a Fortigate 5000 series appliance, and some is on a SOHO sized Fortigate-60B appliance.

What didn't you like about the FortiGate?

 

[VenomXTF]

I'm also not a fan of Fortinet. I've replaced one of their units with pfSense running on a Supermicro Atom server. The Fortinet was hitting 100% CPU and dropping a ton of packets when the connection was not even fully loaded. The pfSense setup hits a max of 5% CPU with 5% memory usage at full load (25mbit max connection speed) with 5 IPSec VPNs.

The Fortinet interface is also annoying, slow, and overall designed bad. pfSense is straight forward and clean. The only things it's missing is the antivirus/content filtering, but I would handle that separately using something like untangle if required.

I won't even get into the bullshit yearly support/license costs with Fortinet.

 

[melchoir]

What didn't you like about the FortiGate?

Bugs in the OS are common, bugs in the UI are common. Opening up over 50+ support tickets with a firewall vendor over an 18 month period is far too many. I'm not happy with their support engineers when one is involved to help diagnose why the firewall is misbehaving.

While they regularly release updates, I've just ran into too many problems that were verified by their support to be problems with their firmware, promised to be fixed in a later release.

 

[snwl_pm]

I'm a product manager at SonicWALL and can answer whatever questions you might have about the NSA and the TZ series. Feel free to PM me if you have questions about going with SonicWALL or if you have questions about your current device.

By the way, we have some exciting firmware coming up with real time traffic (application) visualization. If you PM me and have an eligible device, I can include you in the preview.