Currently, we are evaluating solutions from Barracuda, Sophos, and Fortinet.

In my DRBD example above, I couldn't find a solution without introducing additional hardware between the two farms that either complicated access from authorized hosts or potentially impacted performance. I really needed it to occur at the point of management: the DRBD master of the farm. So, when I am asked, "Did you evaluate other options?", the short answer is "Yes", but on paper only; none of them could accomplish what I needed to achieve.

I don't recall any other options at that time. Somebody else in our office suggested OpenVPN and we went that route and it worked for us.

We were attempting to do a closed VPN between the two sites, but it really doesn't work with the local IPs that we wanted people's Citrix agents to be able to get in. We wanted it to emulate the IP of it being local because eventually we were going to move the Citrix server to the Tacoma site.

Before migrating to Fortinet, we looked at other vendors including Cisco. We found that based on the sizing we needed, the pricing of Cisco AnyConnect was not as competitive.

Personally, I have not found any differences between these products that affect what I need to do.

Not applicable.

I didn’t purchase OpenVPN, but I have evaluated other products for other departments I managed at other companies. Cisco and Fortinet are the two I remember off hand.

Cisco VPN.

Before choosing OpenVPN, I tested the Microsoft Remote Access VPN, and I can say that Microsoft are far away from OpenVPN's level and have a lot of work to get there which can get really expensive.