Choosing Between FortiGate 100D and 200D

[andrew_ang]

I'm setting up a new office that will have a little under 200 users. I'm not sure which product to use. I'm thinking of getting either 2 units of the 100D set up in HA mode, or a single 200D. With the 100D, I can setup a full mesh with a set of stacked switches to avoid single points of failure. I'm a little worried about the lifetime of 100D if we turn on logging since its using flash storage. And getting a fortianalyzer is out of the budget. Any advice? Thanks. Andrew

[andrew_ang]

Hi Ralph, My thoughts exactly. :)

[emnoc]

Good post  Ralph

As far as  how many users a 100D or 200D  can really support has so many ????s , but as long as you know what the capabilities of the 2 and monitor what you do-enable, you should be okay. I have a site with a 100C with 300users but that firewall is like 100% rock solid, never given me a problem uses a eMAN circuit at 20-30megs and very little to lite sslvpn-users and 2 vpn-tunnels

YMMV

[cbun]

Wait for new "E" models.

A Fortigate 60E can compete with a 100D or even 200D in certain areas.A Fortigate 90E is currently listed within online shops, but no datasheet is available, yet. So I expect this one to have a way better performance than a 200D at a much lower price. Get 2 pieces of FG-90E/FG-91E.

[andrew_ang]

Hi Ralph,

Yes, I did consider that. What I'm planning to do is to make use of a 60D in the cabinet, and use that as a "manual" backup in the worst case that the 200D fails. We have a technical services department that should be able to handle the physical port switch. Not ideal, but might be better than nothing.

I will need to turn off any UTM functions for the 60D and have it act as a regular firewall. Configuration management is going to be a headache, since I need to make sure any changes on the 200D (Port forwarding, etc.) get propagated to the 60D, and that would need to be done by hand.

Andrew