Fortinet Hardware Reliability

[Faulty_Male]

Hi Guys, Just wanted to see if anyone has had similar issues. We have had a high number of RMA' ed units over our time with Fortinet. We are not a large user and always use HA to protect against hardware failure. We run 2 FG300A HA clusters (4 units in total) & 1 Fortimail 400 Cluster (2 units in total). So all together 6 fortinet products. we have had the failures below over the last few years:- Fortigate 300A 08/25/2010 RMA in progress Fortimail 400 03/14/2011 RMA Fortimail 400 02/07/2011 RMA Fortigate 300A 04/27/2010 Replacement for RMA DOA Fortigate 300A 03/25/2010 RMA Fortimail 400 05/14/2009 RMA Fortigate 300A 07/18/2007 RMA Fortimail 400 04/10/2007 Recieved DOA Considering we only run 6 units to have the amount of failures above seems excessive. All of our kit is in a datacentre and so power and cooling should not be an issue. I tried to upgrade the software last night on one of our fortigate clusters but this has totally FUBARed to cluster and has resulted in us re-routing traffic away. Let me know what you think or if you have had similar expiriences.

[Faulty_Male]

Just thought I would point out that this means every fortigate unit has been rma' ed over the last 4 years and each fortimail unit has been replaced twice!

[rwpatterson]

The only issues I have had was with a 60A WiFi unit, a DOA FGT 1000A (not quite dead, but flaky as hell), and my FAZ 800 (replaced once). This is since 2006. Perhaps the models you use are less durable?

[Faulty_Male]

Maybe, they are all older models. We have just purchased another 310B cluster so hopefully this will be more stable. I get a lot of grief when these units fail hence the username!

[emnoc]

The older stuff has been problematic in some cases. I' ve seen my fair share of issues with pre A and A series units, but in all fairness, it' s not as bad or worst than juniper or cisco. The newer appliances we will have to wait a few more years to see if any reliability issues develops. But most enterprise business should plan and budget for a network refresh ever 4-6 years regardless. fwiw: How fortinet services you, is my biggest gripe when it comes to RMAs Right now the firmware , has been more problematic than hardware [:' (]

[pcraponi]

I' m Fortinet reseller We have sold more than 400 Fortinet applicance in 5 year. Our RMA rate is very low. Around 3 or 4 device per year... FortiMail, FortiAnalyzer and FortiManager appliance have HD and not SSD. Perhaps for this reason, they have more RMA then Fortigate. regards, Paulo Raponi

[abelio]

Agree with Paulo

[lmuir]

I would have to say I am impressed with the hardware. Our larger units sit in a controlled environment so no surprises there, they are stable. Our smaller units, on the other hand, cop some decent abuse sitting in comms cabinets - temps from -4C to 50C, high humidity, low humidity, vermin using it as a toilet, etc. Have yet to have something fail (other than disks).

[damiri]

very stable. In 300+ installation, over 6-7 years, only one unit failed

[vanc]

I have a FWF-60A at home since 2006 and a FGT-100 (original release) at work since 2005. They are serving me well. Both units still running FOS 3.0. One is on MR6 and one on MR7. I am very impressed with FWF-60A. I have purchased several consumer WiFi routers over last ten years, including a Netgear 11b (forgot the model), a US Robotics 11G (forgot the model), Buffalo G300N v2. All these devices need reboot every couple of days. Otherwise, either I got low connection speed, or no Internet at all. The 60A was once up and running for more than 6 months and I still had reliable Internet connection. That' s my personal experience. I am not a re-seller or network admin. Your mileage may vary.