Anyone switched their core from Cisco to Fortinet?

[Brons2]

Hello, 

We are buying Fortigate firewalls and now senior management is investigating replacing our Cisco core with Fortinet switches.  This would be for the HQ of my organization, about 700 users overall spread across 5 buildings.  We also have about 550 remote sites, we are looking at the 40F and SD-WAN for those, but that's for a different thread.

The Cisco switches are 6509E models, large chassis switches that have been workhorses for a number of years but are now approaching end of life.  We are currently running a 3 tier architecture with the 6509s at the core and also a distribution layer of Cisco 3850s and then access switches of various generations at the access layer.

I was looking at maybe doing a stack of Fortinet 1048E models and then collapsing the campus network from a 3 tier to a 2 tier.  We have lots of fiber so getting 10G from the core to the access switches should not be an issue, other than, we're going to have to buy a lot more GBICS.

Is there anyone else who has done a similar move?  What was your experience like?  The 1048E data sheet states to support 2000 ACL entries, which should be plenty for moving the existing ruleset over.  Am I missing anything?

[emnoc · Accepted solution]

Will we did some fortiswitch 3032D a while back and it went smoothly. These were used for L2 core with TORs being 1048. We went this way since cisco did not want to match the pricing ( they were a nexus shop ) so the customer got a better deal on ftnt gear.

I haven't heard of any complaints, fwiw but we had 1 1048 bad out  the box

Ken Felix