Fortinet FortiADC Reviews

We use Fortinet FortiADC for disaster recovery, server load balancing, and global level server load balancing.

The GSLB is on the internet.

I can do GSLB, global server load balancing, and disaster recovery for server load balancing with web features. We can use the FortiADC as a caching server for user experience, as well as a variety of other things. It is similar to half of the web. it is 80 percent of the web.

The GSLB, the DR side, is the best part. Because we had our main side in one city, we created another, and we had a complete MPLS over the internet. We used the GSLB and data loss for our business applications.

I recently switched from an open-source version to FortiADC. For that, I believe I need to see other vendors such as the F5, as well as the A10 or something before I can say what can be improved.

Because it is so generic, the documentation requires special attention. A person who has not worked on Fortinet FortiADC or a similar product will struggle to understand what the document is trying to say.

The documentation could be more specific, and more detailed.

More step-by-step instructions for a new user, such as someone who has never used Fortinet FortiADC product from Fortinet or anyone else. Because I had previously used an open-source agent, I figured it out, but someone who hasn't would have some difficulties.

Basically, it could be more specific for those who are unfamiliar with the product, so that anyone could begin working with it.

We switched to Fortinet FortiADC five to six months ago.

Fortinet FortiADC is a stable product. The stability of Fortinet FortiADC is good.

In our company, we have three to four people who are working with Fortinet FortiADC excluding myself.

Increasing our usage is dependent on the size of our current IT infrastructure.

If we want to scale it up, we'll need more FortiADCs.

Fortinet FortiADC is easy to scale.

I have contacted technical support. Technical support is good. I would rate it a four and a half out of five.

Our only concern is with the licensing. They will support you if you purchased the licenses. If you haven't, then good luck.

Positive

We were previously using an open-source server load balancing engine, but we switched to FortiADC because of the web filtering, web features, and application delivery, such as pay caching.

I previously used Engine X as a load balancer. You cannot compare an open-source product to a commercial product.

FortiADC now includes web and other features. If I'm talking about load balancing, Engine X will do the same thing that FortiADC does, but the issue is scalability. FortiADC is more scalable than Engine X and similar technologies.

Because, I had already used multiple products, including ADC, load balancers, and the Forti web, I didn't have any difficulty. 

I had assigned one of my proteges to do it, and he was feeling a lot of pressure because he didn't understand the documentation.

If the documentation is good, installation should be simple because you can do it if you understand the document.

I would rate the initial setup a four out of five. I am reducing one because of the documentation.

This solution requires maintenance because it has web features enabled and for the web, the vulnerability features are required. If I want to stop the zero-days, I need to update directly. I'm fairly certain. Because we aren't using it for that purpose, I'm not certain, but I'm 80 to 90 percent certain it requires those kinds of updates, the security update.

We completed the deployment ourselves. We did not use a third-party vendor team.

For me, it was a very simple procedure. Talking about the entire solution takes days. However, if I'm talking about simple FortiADC local server load balancers, it took me about a day.

Pricing is determined by the size of your organization, as it involves open-source if you have a small company, open-source can help small businesses and IT departments. Why do you need to purchase FortiADC? 

However, if you're talking about large corporations that require this level of scalability and security, you will have to pay for it. What options do you have?

The price varies depending on whether you are dealing with a local team or a presale team, and some offer discounts.

They offer a perpetual license.

I would rate the pricing a four out of five.

For the time being, I believe it is a complete product. Maybe not, but it all depends on the use cases, for the time being, I don't believe that it requires any additional features for it. If I have a new requirement and this product does not meet it, I would suggest that something needed to be included or added.

I would recommend it because you don't need to buy a heavy product if you only have a few application tools. However, if you are serving more than 5,000 to 10,000 people, you will need to purchase FortiADC, a proper load balancer. It could be from Fortinet, F5, A10, or any other vendor.

We are a professional services team. We provide professional services to Fortinet and other vendors.

Our company is a partner of Fortinet.

I would rate Fortinet FortiADC a nine out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for various clients.

For one customer, we use the solution for global load balancing, GSLB, and sending DNS requests to the primary DNS.

For another customer, we use the solution as the ADC for data centers to protect all websites and use Layer 7 to provide DDos protection and load balancing for web traffic. 

For a third customer, we use the solution as a GSLB but rented a data center rack to deploy as a virtual machine with all DNS requests going to the cloud and then to the customer. 

Our company provides WAF and complicated applications to customers. If we do not use the solution, we have issues because it protects the web server from SQL injections, XSS, DDoS, and HTTP attacks. Competitors such as Palo Alto, Check Point, and even FortiGate cannot provide a WAF. 

Link load balancing also helps us to reduce our linked and internal traffic. 

The solution provides high-level services such as availability, redundancy, and load balancing between servers. 

Routing protocols are better than those in FortiWeb.

For example, CNN has one website but a lot of web traffic so we need more than one server for high availability and load sharing. The solution allows for load sharing across multiple servers or even multiple data centers where they run as active/active or active/passive. If we lose the primary data center due to natural disaster or a high global load, we can manipulate DNS traffic to the secondary data center.

The solution's WAF needs an upgrade because it is not as good as FortiWeb, VMware, F5, or Imperva. 

The solution should be migrated to a software-defined network like Imperva and VMware. 

I have been using the solution for ten years. 

The solution is stable. We use version 6.2.4 to provide better stability than the newer versions which have more bugs.  

The scalability is limited to 200 gigabit throughput on the best version of the solution which is the 5000F series. 

We can use the solution as an HA in active/active mode which allows us to increase throughput by 50%. 

For one customer, we used the 1200F series with a 40 gigabit throughput and usage was less than 70% with one million users. 

I have not used technical support for the solution but have used it for other Fortinet products. 

Colleagues work for the company so I can get quick solutions for issues. 

For one particular issue, technical support was not able to resolve our issue so they sent us a new version of the solution and that solved the problem. 

The initial setup and configuration are very easy because the solution includes a simple OS. Initial configuration takes about ten minutes for simple environments. 

It is important to assess the environment and decide what services, servers, and web applications are needed. 

The solution can be configured in router mode or one-arm mode which uses source NAT as destination NAT to send traffic to the firewall. One-arm mode is more complex and requires discussions with our engineers. 

For example, you have a website with Node.js for your programming language, Amazon S3 for your CDN, NGINX for your web server, and you use both React and reCAPTCHA. Our team meets with your developer to learn your website and OS through a multi-step process and then we configure the solution to protect everything. 

Depending on the complexity of the project, we implement the solution ourselves or sometimes we rely on third-party teams to assist us. 

The solution is less expensive than F5 or Imperva and is the most reasonably priced option available. 

We use different solutions based on a customer's needs and budget. 

Imperva is the best solution, F5 is the best for on-premises, and we also like Magic Quadrant. 

VMware has all the features of FortiADC such as GSLB, load balancer, and WAF. It can be used for your data center or as a software-defined network with a single point of management that does not have 200 gigabit limitations. 

It is important to know your network and load share needs before deciding on a solution. This assessment will help you decide if a certain model of the solution will meet your needs or if you should look at another product such as F5, Imperva, or VMware. 

I currently use version 6.2.4 of the solution because we will not update to 7.0 or 7.1 until they are in the market for a year and all bugs have been worked out. 

Fortinet equipment can have bugs and some exist in the version we use but the there are more bugs in the newer versions. 

I rate the solution a six out of ten. 

We load segregated data from the web application firewalls and have an alternative load balancer for both our internal and external applications. There are some extensive rewrites that we need. This load is used across our geographically dispersed locations, and data centers, that are actually facilitating both regions.

The ease of use is because of the functionality across these devices currently in the market. Most of the features are the same that they are offering with the certificate, be it the offloading options, load-balancing features, which is a provision, and a set of rules that you can implement. That has been kind of a common standard, of course, depending on the money and the grade of the device. Ease of use in deploying and having it up and running needs minimal knowledge is another reason. 

I would say in terms of their basic selling point was always everything built into one, even if you take their Fortigate firewalls, FortiWeb Application Firewall, be it FortiADC, they do push many features into one. And even the smallest version or the model of the device still gives you extensive features, but that comes at the cost of CPU and memory, which makes it hard. Even before you start to use extensive features, you start already seeing the CPU and memory be used to capacity. So at some point, I feel like there is a mismatch between the number of features they are offering and the device capacity on how much it can handle. If they can provide much more flexibility in designing it, that would be great because of the number of options it provides either fixed set as of now but given some open sources do more options, open source software, so configured on Linux and Freebase, they offer more than this. 

I have been working with Fortinet FortiADC for the past four years now.

When it comes to stability the issues are minimal. However, whenever we faced an issue, it was a major issue. So it does work well in normal mode, but when it has a problem, then it can be a very difficult situation.

With the scalability option on the cloud, you can have that easily. 

When I have worked with technical support on many occasions they do offer proper assistance in a timely manner, but their initial processing in the Fortinet support structure is more of a challenge. Depending on the educational level of the technical support depends on the speed of how your support ticket is handled and could take longer to diagnose.

Neutral

The initial plan was to have FI as a global load balancer, but given the cost factor, we switched to FortiADC.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. You work with some network interfaces through configuration, plug it in, and have a default rule in place, and it still runs. It does the job on its own.

We could manage it internally, as I mentioned, the ease of use and how easy you can deploy, it was still better, but I could not say the same for other devices. I have seen where you definitely need either an expert or vendor support to have those rules configured on other deployments. We do not have that kind of dependency with Fortinet or FortiADC products.

You definitely need a support license. If it is critical web application firewalls and they have hundreds and thousands of customers, then I would say FortiADC higher models would definitely support it well.

I would rate Fortinet FortiADC an eight out of ten.

It's used for load-balancing traffic and DNS traffic as well. We use FortiADC as the global traffic manager and DNS solution and also as a classic load application delivery controller.

We use it to load balance between applications.

It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5.

Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale. Maybe some new features could be added to address these issues.

Another area of improvement is support. So the only problems are with support, and scaling can be a bit difficult. I

It's been five years now. Currently, it's version 6.4.

It is a stable solution.  We haven't faced any problems with stability, so let's say it's an eight out of ten.

It's scalable. We can add more ADCs to the cluster if needed.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. Because if we miss the appliance's sizing in the beginning, it will be hard to scale.

Our clients are small to medium-sized businesses. We didn't deploy the big appliances.

The support is bad. Unfortunately, they are very late in responding to our requests. It takes too much time.

Negative

The initial setup is easy to install. The process is straightforward.

The deployment takes around two to three days, considering the installation and configuration of some applications. We can easily configure the profiles.

Usually, two people from my team, two engineers, work on the product. Moreover, customers usually request maintenance. So, one person is involved in the maintenance process.

I believe the price is good. It's fair. There are no extra costs. You just pay for the license and, if applicable, for the hardware appliance. If it's a VM, there is no additional cost for the license.

It's up to the customer to choose a licensing model. If you choose to buy yearly, it's usually on a yearly basis.

You can go ahead and buy this product. It's very good, pretty stable, and the price is fair, as I mentioned. So, in terms of competition, it's a good product.

Overall, I would rate it as an eight.

I use Fortinet FortiADC for load balancing for different data centers.

My experience with Fortinet has been very positive. It provides a great layer when it comes to SD-WAN and other security capabilities. It offers many models for a host of environments. 

I like the solution's load balance with DNS intelligence.

The price of the product is problematic.

The configuration is relatively complex. 

The solution is stable. 

I have had no need for customer support. 

The solution has a relatively complex setup. 

We used resellers for the deployment. 

The solution could be more cost-effective. 

The solution is deployed both on-cloud and on-premises. 

I rate Fortinet FortiADC as an eight out of ten.