Fortinet FortiADC Reviews

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.

We mainly use FortiADC for load balancing the application traffic for our customers. The aim is for the traffic to be equally balanced between servers, whether there are two, 10 or 20 servers. There are different load balancing algorithms that we have on the FortiADC and based on that we configure and we load balance the traffic. We have a static website, so we can use FortiWeb instead of the connection coming from the client each time. FortiADC gets the request from the cache Instead of it being sent to the server. If we have different ISP links, then we do our link load balancing using FortiADC. I'm a senior cyber security engineer and we are distributors of FortiADC.

There are a lot of benefits to the customer using this solution. Because FortiADC helps in load balancing traffic, at peak times the logs get sent to FortiAnalyzer where they have an automated SOAR, security orchestration and automation for the incident response. Whenever it detects an attack, it will automatically trigger an alert on the service ticket and send it to the appropriate team. That's the benefit of this solution to the company. 

The most valuable features would be content caching and content compression. It also has an inbuilt firewall. I doubt whether any other ADC supports this firewall feature. It also has a web application firewall feature.

Any issues with this solution seem to be connected to technical support. They need to respond more quickly, providing a one or two day response time is not adequate. In addition, the company hasn't provided good technical documentation. It requires step by step procedures on how to configure some of the features on the FortiADC. They should come up with good KB articles and information related to the workings of the product. Fortinet specifies that the solution can be used for 1,000 clients, but actually we've found that you can't go above 400 for content compression and rewriting. If you go above 400, the solution becomes unresponsive. 

I've been using this solution for about five years. 

It's a reliable solution but I think F5 is better as a load balancer. We sometimes get bugs but Fortinet has a specialized bug team that can create a patch within a specified period of time, two weeks or maybe within a month and the issue will be rectified. The solution needs maintenance each time they release a new firmware. The stability needs to be tested and we need to check whatever we are running, and make sure there are no critical bugs.

The solution is scalable up to a point. If you're expanding your company and have a lot of customers, say 2,000, you need to go for a higher end model. Otherwise you'll have problems if you're using the hardware model. With the cloud and with the VM, you can always scale to your requirements. We have 400 users. We implement the solution and if customers want to use our website and database servers, the client traffic will hit the ADC and it will load balance to all the servers. If the company decides to expand, then we might need to scale FortiADC. 

Technical support has a policy that only a priority one ticket will be given priority. Without that, there can be a significant delay in getting a response from technical support. It's not good enough. 

I've had minimal experience with F5 which has more features and I think most people would go for F5. In cases where customers are using other Fortinet products they will prefer to go with FortiADC because of the SOAR feature on the FortiAnalyzer and automatic incident response on other things. 

The initial setup is straightforward. You bring up FortiADC and you configure the interfaces, then you configure the load balancing profiles. That's it. I carry out the deployment myself and it generally takes a week or two. Deployment time is based on the customer configuration, load balancing profiles, but it generally takes a maximum of two weeks. 

The deployment plan is to get the topology of the customer. Once that is complete, we create this HLD and LLD and also the solution diagram. Those are the main things that we do before deployment. Once we have the HLD, LLD reports, then we implement within the customer environment and we test if everything works, and if everything is good it gets put into production. 

The main reason a client wants this load balancer is because there is a load on the web server and one of them becomes unresponsible and that means a big loss for the company. It's the main reason they purchase FortiADC. Once they implement this solution there are no issues with the load server. 

From a pricing perspective, I believe FortiADC is cheaper than the F5 and also cheaper than some of the well established load balancers. There is a subscription fee but I'm not sure of the exact cost.

I would recommend using FortiADC, they seem to be coming up with some new features. They have a lot of patents compared to other security companies. They're coming up with new machine learnings and other features. The solution provides an overall good experience. 

I would currently rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use the solution for deploying applications on local servers. Most customers use it for local traffic management and use the benefits of a security profile.

Fortinet FortiADC’s basic feature is present in all models, providing control over load balancing. Additionally, extra features found in FortiADC include bridging, which enables load balancing for CDB, UDP, and SDP.

The solution includes all the features, as well as support for global traffic management and local traffic management tools. It offers forward compatibility to integrate smoothly with Sandbox environments.

The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily. It has its own antivirus.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

I have been using Fortinet FortiADC as an integrator for five years.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable. Every virtual machine can expand easily. You must make size coding for three or five years for flexibility. FortiADC doesn’t have restrictions on the number of applications. It provides high availability and built-in security features like antivirus and sandbox integration.

Technical support is very good.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and depends on the number of nodes and applications. Deploying one node takes around 50 minutes.

It depends on the node and server application, source address, communication delivery control, URL, or port ID.

The product is cheap and has a yearly license.

I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

The deployment and the audio trimming may take one day.

FortiADC is stable and operates on a proprietary operating system. One advantage it has over some competitors, which run on Linux, is the strength of its operating system. This strengthens its security control. It offers a good service.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are an academic institution and our primary use of FortiADC is for student registrations. In the month that I have been using this solution, it seems to be working fine. It is a trial version and I am using it as a virtual appliance, rather than a physical one.

Our students can use this solution to view communication that has been published, including for courses. It can be viewed using computers connected to the internet, phones, and other mobile devices.

The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading. TSL and SSL offloading are both very good features.

This solution improves security for servers by offering data loss protection.

FortiADC is complex to configure so the interface should be improved. The commands that you need to use are complex.

I have been evaluating FortiADC for about one month.

The platform is very easy to scale because it's virtual. You just buy licenses and increase the hardware when needed. We have as many as 3,000 users, although not all of the time. We probably have about 1,000 concurrent users. All of them are students.

The FortiADC technical support has responded to my questions and resolved issues.

I have used Brocade, which is now obsolete and the company did not release a similar product. Brocade was a good product with good performance, but I need new firmware and I can't upgrade it. It is restricted to TLS version 1.0 only, whereas I need to use TLS 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3. TLS 1.0 has weak encryption.

The initial setup of Brocade was complex and the company could not make the configuration easier. You needed experience because it is mostly operated through the command-line interface. It is similar to a Cisco product in this way. I was able to complete the setup on my own by reading the documentation that was available on the internet.

I am currently evaluating FortiADC and Kemp.

The Kemp solution lacks information and the graphical interface is not very good. Also, Kemp has given us no support.

I was interested in evaluating a solution by Barracuda but I could not get a trial version.

The suitability of this solution depends on the users and the company. Load balancing is very important for big companies. They need to use it for TSL and SSL offloading. 

I am not interested in additional features. I only want FortiADC to work fine as it catches security breaches and increases performance.

Overall, FortiADC is a good product, although it is complex to configure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am an IT integrator and we sell ADC, mainly Fortinet FortiADC.

In our last project, we used Fortinet FortiADC for load balancing some specific applications for telecom.

The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading capacity.

It is easy to manage and easy to configure.

The initial setup could be simplified.

It's a stable solution.

They have different appliances to cover low performance, less performance, and big-box data that supports large capacities. 

With our customers, we have 200,000 end-users.

Technical support for me is okay and I don't have any problems with them. I have no complaints.

The initial setup was not complex, but it was not simple either.

These types of machines have complexity, but with a good engineering team, it is much easier to do the jobs.

We have a team of two to deploy and maintain this solution.

The design, installation, and configuration took one week.

I would rate Fortinet FortiADC a nine out of ten.

Mixed server environment with Apache Servers, IIS Servers and internal applications. Load balance all the servers through VIPs to equally distribute all the connections among the servers and SSL Offloading. We’ve used it to reduce our server farm, lowering cost, and effectively use all the servers at once.

The boxes were used to load balance the environment, making it more reliable, and improving the performance and response of the applications.

• SSL Offloading
• VM availability
• L7 load balancing

The user interface could be more friendly and CLI could be more like that of Fortigate.

No real stability issues, the system is good. Had a few problems but did a firmware upgrade and it solved them; not sure if it was a firmware problem.

Had no need to scale it up, so all good.

I didn't need to use support for this solution, but usually Fortinet support is good, not great but good.

I’m a F5 engineer as well and, to be honest, I do prefer BIG-IP, but as I’ve worked at Fortinet partners I had to deploy some of these. Before FortiADC, I deployed a FortiBalancer (the old ADC); it was a great improvement from FortiBalancer to FortiADC.

The initial setup is sort of easy but you go through a lot of screens to do it.

Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better.

I’m used to deploying F5 BIG-IP load balancer and all of its modules. Either it’s way easier or I'm more used to it.

It’s easy to use, but it could have more features, when comparing it to a F5.

Make a checklist before going into it hands-on. This will make it faster to become familiar with the application's behaviour; not all the apps can be load balanced. The best way is to implement it is to have PATs or VIPs from the firewall pointing to FortiADC virtual servers. Check into the best load balance method and, as I said, check app behaviour before choosing it. Try not to set it as round robin.

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.

The situation is a seminar session for about 250 users who need access to a BI server through their client in-house application. It's look like this:

Five Servers -> FortiADC -> FortiWLC-> Meru Wireless 

Even though FortiADC is not completely working for me, overall it helps me provide workload distribution to the servers, as expected.

Of course the troubleshooting tools. I think the troubleshooting command is easy and useful. Because ADC is the intermediary between the servers and the end-user application, it gives thorough information about the traffic, what the problem is.

The L7 Persistent load-balancing algorithm has not worked for me after having tested it many times with my customer's in-house application. I'd like to suggest that the company make sure that all load-balancing algorithms work properly with most applications, even those that are in-house apps, because this is the main requirement of ADC.

After I created a virtual server, the servers are still reachable from the client side by a Ping command. That did not happen with F5. I have to work around it 
by setting up a traffic policy.

I did not test the SSL decryption feature but it's an essential point that FortiADC ensure they can support all the newest encryption methods and always be up to date.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

 I have not engaged ADC support.

I think they can make it easier. The company's homework is to redesign those menus to configure with the smallest number of steps.

If FortiADC wants to compete - and having used F5 LTM for a year - in my opinion:

1. They should make the Knowledge Base easier to access. They need a "cookbook" like Fortigate. They should modernize their web community appearance.
2. From my experience with the F5 support team, it is quite easy to access and very fast to respond. I was very impressed with them, compared to other vendors.
3. They need to provide a longer test license (30-45 makes sense, not 15 days which is what they offer currently). Have your partner manage the test
   license. With F5, for example, I can manage the license through the web with a few clicks to select product - done.
4. They should go advanced by providing a set of APIs to customize for specific requirements.