Product Reviews

Fortinet's security appliances stand out, thanks mainly to the number of features the company manages to pack into a box. Initial outlay is higher than for the PRO 5060, but whereas SonicWALL offers lots of optional features, the FortiGate 800 includes a stateful packet inspection firewall, anti-virus measures, email attachment scanning and website content filtering, IPSec VPNs, plus intrusion detection and prevention.

Build quality is as good as the 5060 and the FortiGate 800 also offers a healthy complement of gigabit Ethernet ports. Three serve as high-speed LAN, WAN and DMZ links, while the fourth supports high-availability links with other FortiGate 800 appliances. It uses Fortinet's custom ASIC and the FortiOS OS is supplied on a 64MB CompactFlash card.

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A bonus is the 40GB internal hard disk, which is used as an anti-virus file quarantine location and for storing the system logs.

The appliance functions in either routed or transparent mode and initial installation is swift. All unsolicited inbound traffic is blocked by default but this can be customised by adding new firewall policies, which can be scheduled to be active at specific times, and include traffic shaping rules as well. Zones can be used to group specific interfaces and VLANs together to simplify policy creation.

The email and anti-spam filters aren't up to much, as you can only block using lists of banned words or phrases. SMTP can't be scanned so only incoming messages will be checked. Even then, all you can do is tag subject lines with a comment that must then be processed using rules on your own mail server or client. Web filtering is also primitive, as you only block access using lists of URLs or words and phrases that appear in the page. If you want full content filtering, you need to subscribe to the FortiGuard service, which uses Fortinet's external ratings database.

The FortiGate 800 is a total network-security product well suited to enterprise networks. Some of the standard web and email-filtering features will take some time to set up, but you get more for your money than the SonicWALL alternative.