New / Upgrade Firewall Needed

[ToffeeMan]

We are looking to upgrade / replace our current firewall (Sonicwall NSA4500) with a new one due to soon hosting a parent portal and an ever increasing influx of mobile devices and tablets in the school. We need to link with Active Directory, have very good anti-spam, web filtering, real-time and historic reports, NAT forwarding and work well with terminal servers. Currently I have been advised that Fortigate FG300D is a good option (though the cost is prohibitive as you have to buy a separate reporting device and no edu discount or incentive), Sonicwall are coming back with info on what they recommend (tho' support not great), also interested in anyone's experience of Untangle and Smoothwall in a school environment.

[DSP]

I am currently testing a SonicWALL 9200 from a NSA 3600.

 

Have found it's taken a while to get right but after 18 months on the network it's running well with few issues.

 

We recently got stung (I assume like many) with how we filter SSL with what seems to be many sites moving over to secure by default - thus the reason we've gone for a bigger SonicWALL for better DPI-SSL performance.

 

It's currently enforcing safe search over SSL (many well established filters still don't do this very well) on all major search engines and having looked around at many other options I think we'll stick with our SonicWALL (as we've invested a lot of time getting the config right for our network).

 

Interesting to see how others are coping with SSL filtering?

[tom_newton]

Many Smoothwall Edu customers also use our firewall functionality - happy to answer any of your questions!

[SchoolsBroadband]

Fortigates are great as a firewall and fast as grease lightning!

 

The 300D is quite a meaty box though and we'd only install on a leased line of over 300mbit and 2000 users +.

 

The mk2 100D's are fine for most secondary schools.

 

Dave