Fortigate Sizing Guidelines

[#1]

Hello All, I am trying to find some documentation/recommendations on Fortigate sizing. I currently have 2 offices that have 60Bs. One office has 50 users and the other office has 120 users. These 2 Fortigates constantly enter conserve mode - thus disabling Internet access during this time. I have basically just started turning off features (A/V, IPS, etc.) in order to prevent this from happening, but it still happens. I feel that the boxes are under-specced for the amount of users we have and need to be upgraded but am having a difficult time finding any documents or recommendations on how many users X model of Fortigate is supposed to support. Does anyone have any documents or even just recommendations on Fortigate sizing? Much Thanks. P.S. Yes I have seen this tech note and followed it and still have problems. http://kb.fortinet.com/kb/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=11076&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KCARTICLE_1_1&dialogID=5469458&stateId=0%200%205467997

[g3rman]

It all sort of depends on what kind and how much traffic you push through your boxes. 60-120 users would call for something like a 110C or better. Check out the spec sheet at http://www.fortinet.com/doc/FortinetMatrix.pdf. Any idea how much traffic you are pushing?

[ejhardin]

The real question is how much money are you planning on spending? I also have about 50 users and purchased the FWF80CM thinking that it work and Fortinet agrees that my box is not under powered but I' m still have memory issue. I followed the same document that you have attach and have disabled most of the UTM features and still having issues. The FWF80CM has 512MB of memory. This should be enough. Fortinet.... FYI, memory is cheap... upgrade the memory, please. Anyway I' m done with Fortinet and currently reviewing other vendors. I would recommend you do the same. If you are planning on staying with Fortinet I would not recommend anything below a 110c but really the new 200b look good on paper but it’s also around 3,000.00.

[FortiRack_Eric]

There little difference between 80C and 110C other than more mem (512MB vs 1 GB) and a Intel 600Mhz Celeron and 600Mhz Pentium The no of users is in my opinion not a very good sizing method. Better is the internet speed (and usage) currently and expected in the next couple of years.

[#5]

No, I don' t know exactly how much traffic we are pushing a day, what would be the best way to do that on the Fortigate? I' m guessing to reset the count on my internal > wan1 policy and see what the count is at the end of the day? Regardless, I don' t think we' re really pushing a ton of traffic per day, but we do have times during the day when traffic peaks and that' s when it seems to enter conserve mode. We have 3Mbps in the 50 user office and 6Mbps in the 120 user office. This is about to be upgraded to a 20Mbps MPLS network.

[g3rman]

Hmm .. it' s odd that the 60B would choke on a 3 or 6 Mbp/s connection. For going to a 20 Mbp/s MPLS circuit you' re definitely looking at a 110C or 200 series.

[#7]

I should add that the Fortigates also route traffic over several different private T1 connections we have between branch offices as well as the Internet connections.