Alternatives to sonicwall firewalls ?

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#196833 14-Jun-2016 16:53

Looking at the prices of Sonicwall Firewalls, and all the additional charges for the addons required (addons that should just come bundled in
the original price) .......

Im considering alternatives to say the sonicwall TZ300.
the basic TZ300 unit requires addons for content filtering, intrustion prevention , packet inspection , licenses for VPN client for PC's , all at additional costs
without all these addons, is it even worth getting over something much cheaper ?
So what does the TZ300 actually give, that a good modern business class router (say a Draytek) cant ?

A descent router should be able to give site to site VPN, statefull packet inspection, port forwarding FROM specific internet IP's only etc etc ??

Has anyone gone down this path lately with Hardware firewall upgrades?

This is generalizing, Companies with anywhere between 5-30 PC's . We have a few clients with very old Sonicwalls .

ubergeeknz

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#1571824 14-Jun-2016 16:57

Firewalls offer a bit more than routers in terms of security, deep packet inspection, pattern detection, and such. Whether you need that probably depends on the type of environment.

Might be worth looking at Fortigate UTM, I've had exposure to their "bigger" products (enterprise -> telco) and they've proven to work well, good support, and competitive pricing. There are several NZ resellers.

networkn

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#1571845 14-Jun-2016 17:30

As a long term Sonicwall supplier, we have been frustrated with support, and yes they can add up.

Recently we assessed Sophos, which given their name I was exceptionally wary of, but I can't help but be impressed. Their UI isn't as good as the SW, but support has been ok, and the price is pretty reasonable, however, like SW, UTM services are all charged for separately, and you'll find they do this with most reputable brand. It's like AV, you pay for the subscription for the Updates.

The biggest rort with Sonicwall is the GMS and the cost of it. Sophos include their (less functional) version for free, but it's still pretty decent for basic stuff like establishing VPN's by dragging a line between two devices and providing basic information.

We looked at Watchguard (Horrible support, horrible UI) and a few others. Fortinet are good, but we found them price inaccessible and we had issues with support for a customer, where we had a fairy basic issue and to log a case you had to provide a network diagram, and a BUNCH of information, which was just a nuisance.

billgates

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#1571854 14-Jun-2016 18:11

We use and deploy Fort I gate. The newer E series models SOC are optimised around UTM. VPN licenses/clients are free/unlimited. The first 10 clients will show no advert but any installs beyond that show some advert from Fortigate. You can pay to get the adverts removed.

Do whatever you want to do man.