Fortinet’s Fortigate-3600

Summary of Clear Choice Test of Fortinet’s Fortigate-3600.

Fortinet slapped SSL VPN software into its Fortigate line of security appliances with the current v3.0 release, and in doing that, has a number of serious issues to contend with. It’s rare that we see a product in a public test that has so many substantial bugs that it failed almost every test we ran against it.

While every product is entitled to a problem here or there, the Fortigate-3600 we tested could not handle the most basic HTML Web proxy function, could not connect to our Windows-based file server and couldn’t support Citrix or Windows Terminal Services (see results of application interoperability tests). When we brought up a Fortinet’s network-extension connection, the one application we cared most about, VoIP, didn’t work. In addition, serious design flaws, such as the inability to dynamically assign users to groups (see results of policy tests) and the lack of a prepopulated portal (see results of portal tests) makes this an amateurish first version. We strongly suggest you hold off buying Fortinet’s SSL VPN product until the company has a chance to put considerably more development time into it.

The kindest thing we can say about Fortinet is that the high availability worked as advertised (see results of high-availability tests). High availability was easy to set up, and when the primary node failed, users did not have to reauthenticate, although any network-extension sessions were interrupted and had to be manually reestablished.

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