Firewalls

I deal with mostly small companies fewer than 50 employees. When it comes to firewalls I normally recommend 1 of two brands. Sonicwall and Fortinet. Until recently my preference was for Sonicwall. I had a company that needed to upgrade their Fortigate 60 they had just outgrown it. So as I do I recommended Sonicwall 2040. They had several web, a few mail servers and an accounting system they accessed over the internet. Their T1 line was getting over loaded so they got a DSL from Verizon 3meg down and 1meg up. Even though the Fortigate could handle 2 lines it was time to upgrade. What I had planed to do it have all out going trafic (Web 80 and 443 and the accounting system) go out the DSL line and have the rest of the traffic go out the T1 line. This was all fine and good but the Sonicwall 2040 kept dropping the DSL line. If I hooked up the DSL line to the Forigate or a computer it was just fine. I worked with Sonicwall for something like 3 months and they sent a new unit etc. etc. we were never able to get it to work.

They got a Forigate 200A and it has performed beyond my expectation with few exceptions. They have many web sites, 2 mail servers, site to site VPN’s, Dial up IPSEC VPN’s, SSL VPN, Content Filtering and more coming off the same unit.

To Sonicwall’s credit (this is the reason I may still use them) they let them return the unit to who they purchased it from and refunded all their money. Sonicwall still seems to have has a leg up on SSL VPN’s since they just purchased Aventail.

Just my options

     Rick www.epnetworking.com