If you want networking with training wheels, Meraki is the way to go.
Especially in retail environments where you have fairly basic needs. Their
Meraki-to-Meraki VPN has been pretty solid in our experience with a 20 site
client, integrating with non-Meraki VPN has been spotty especially with how
their policies work, and their remote VPN is definitely not as good as
AnyConnect, pretty sure it is just OpenVPN rebranded, like Sophos does. This
product was designed for non-engineers. Another big frustration is the fact
that their WAN failover is hard coded to ping 8.8.8.8, seriously.
(https://documentation.meraki.com/MX-Z/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/Connection_Monitoring_for_WAN_Failover)
, it takes 5 minutes for it to even recognize there is an outage. It may say
Cisco Meraki, but it is more like Cisco Linksys.
We switched from Cisco to Fortinet almost exclusively nowadays. They work
great, priced very aggressively and have all the advanced features you can
desire and expect. Never use a .0 code-base as their QA can really suck, but
they do make updates fairly frequently. FortiClient for VPN looks like
malware/scareware, we try to push everyone with Windows 10 to just use the
Forticlient App as it works great and is very lightweight. We gave Fortimanager
a try twice and I just can't get it to work for our use-case, so your mileage
may vary, ask for a trial key to play with it before committing, we use their
REST API in 5.6 for all our management with internal tools. Fortianalyzer is
pretty nice for aggregating multiple sites. The FortiAPs actually work really
well and can be managed from the FortiGate. They are great for remote workers
in that you can just give them an AP and it will self-provision.
Tl,dr; Meraki is stupid simple with a basic feature set, Fortigate can do
anything you want, but requires a bit more expertise to troubleshoot.
Hit me up if you have any other questions, I have strong opinions on all of
them.
Bret Esquivel
President
IMMENSE NETWORKS
10988 N. Harrells Ferry Rd., Suite 7
Baton Rouge, LA 70816
P: 225-754-9005
F: 866-850-7519
Web: www.immense.net
________________________________
From: General <general-boun...@brlug.net> on behalf of Mark A. Lappin
<ma...@lmfj.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2018 7:20 PM
To: general@brlug.net
Subject: [brlug-general] Meraki vs Fortinet
Any strong opinions on Meraki vs Fortinet for multi site connectivity ? Anybody
used both with first hand knowledge of both (on Fortinet, I am also looking at
a fortimanager).
- no I'm not looking at full on Cisco gear right now
- my arm could be twisted to sophos XG but Sophos red will not work per their
engineers for what I need
- no, I'm not building a router out of a spare computer
- siri, Ok google and Cortana are ignoring me
Mark A. Lappin, CCNA, MCITP: Enterprise Administrator
Director of Information Technology
Lee Michaels Fine Jewelry - Corporate Office
5630 Bankers Avenue | Baton Rouge, LA 70808-2609
[O] 225.368.3645 [F] 225.368.3675 [E] ma...@lmfj.com
www.lmfj.com<http://www.lmfj.com>
This communication is privileged and confidential. If you are not the intended
recipient, please notify the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of
this communication.
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