Fortinet vs Sonicwall

[sushil]

Don' t know if this is the right place to post this question here or not? Here one customer of mine is need to a UTM. So need to check the apple to apple comparison on fortinet and sonicwall. Is there any feature in fortinet which is not there in comparable product of sonicwall(100A-300A).I don' t have much idea about sonicwall. Reg, Sushil

[sushil]

Can somebody please update on this. Reg, Sushil

[red_adair]

it' s a Fortinet Forum. So i guess answers will be flavoured ;-) Sonicwall doesn' t have that many features as Fortigate - i had a look some months ago when they launched their NSA boxes. Looks good on the first look - but there is no " depths" - means you can do what they want to let you do. Other than FortiOS where you mostly have different ways of solving problems. They also do not have a proper AntiVirus engine - this " stream based" approach really sucks; its more like a try to catch virii with an IPS approach - which fails by design. So buying a FortiGate is not a mistake IMHO.

[abelio]

They also do not have a proper AntiVirus engine - this " stream based" approach really sucks; its more like a try to catch virii with an IPS approach - which fails by design.

Agree with you. Indeed, ask their salesman to bring you a demo trying to catch a known virus compressed within a tar or bzip file and take your own conclusions. Don' t be blinded with their AV throughput numbers...

[kckong]

I have a Sonicwall box before, about 7 years ago, it is a XPS series, with unlimited user access. Every time when new firmware version available, I usually install the latest release into the box. However, sometime the latest version will cause the box hang there after several operation hours....... then I need to roll back to the previous firmware version, and waiting for the next release..... I have change the box several times, and sure is the firmware problem. So, one year later (after the h/w warranty period expired) I change the box to other brand name, and I put all Sonicwall product in my " BLACK LIST"

[sushil]

Thanks a lot for all your pointers. My job is little tough here because my customer provides services to Sonicwall.So he is in little dilemma.I been able to convince their IT team on merit as far as fortigate is concerned,now the next are top management where we will be holding the meeting. Would like to know whether sonicwall has inbuilt montioring of the logs or is it the same like fortinet where logs needs to montiored thorugh fortiananalyzer. Can I check the subject as well as content of the mail sent through the fortigate? Can I create exception list on the basis of mac addresses? Reg, Sushil

[emnoc]

For most sonicwall appliances, you should be able to direct logs to a syslog-host and then use common tools for grepping logs. You could also direct logs to the FortiAnalyzer as while if you wanted.

[Jshaw]

Sonincwall has a software based reporting solution that is called Viewpoint. It should come with any unit that is purchased with the content security gateway bundle. I like that fact that it is software and and not appliance based solution. I can spin these up in VM' s in just a few minutes. So for the vs part... Please don' t bash but sonicwall does have a better NAT engine and the built-in wireless lan controller rocks. They also have an App firewall but that is a wash when 4.0 comes out. Other than that Fortinet wins in all other categories.

[rb400]

Anyone know of any complete and quality written (free or paid) reviews of these two vendors? and their enterprise level products?