Jason Lee

So after all the demos and testing going live with our new firewalls was fairly anti-climactic. 

Months ago we started the demos with some great sales staff at Fatpipe, Radware, and Astrocom load balancing devices and all performed well head to head.  We had narrowed the field down to the Radware primarily because of the included services.  Fatpipe was wanting us to pay extra for the same QOS that Radware included (Not to mention Radware performed better head to head with the others) and well the Astrocom boxes just didn’t handle the demo well.

So we were all but ready to move forward with Radware until Jeremie and I took a road trip to Ohio for a SonicWall Road Show where we learned a lot about the new E-Class firewall.  The E-Class is SonicWall’s answer to the enterprise environment.  After the Road Show our reseller (Mark at CMSupportServices.com) gave us the opportunity to have a 30 day demo of the E-Class and we couldn’t pass up that opportunity. 

Finally we decided that we would purchase the E-Class… Why you ask?  While there were some services that came with the Radware hardware the yearly recurring costs were fairly high.  Even after comparing the E-Class with Radware we decided the features that the Radware had over the E-Class were not important to us.  But we did come to the conclusion that the E-Class performed very well and had the added benefits that we didn’t have an ‘extra’ set of additional appliances and the yearly recurring costs were very much in range with what we were already paying for the services we had on or SonicWall 4060.  The last benefit was a great bonus that we now would have a redundant pair of firewalls removing that nagging concern that we were purchasing hardware to balance and give us fail over capability with our ISPs but our firewalls were still a single point of failure.   So we put the E-Class thru the same tests and it has performed very well. 

So why has it been anti-climactic ?  We had put the E-Class into production once during a test but were waiting for our next work night to roll out the new E-Class firewalls but then life happens.  Around 11 am all the web based applications on my desktop started failing, so I called our great network admin Jeremie.  A few minutes later JK comes to my office and says a Jeremie quotable… “Hey, so do you want to migrate to the E-Class this morning”?  Knowing Jeremie I knew this wasn’t good news.  JK went on to explain that our 4060 was in a reboot loop so we had the choice move forward with the replacement of the firewall and migrate to the E-Class or connect with support to resolve the issues with the 4060 and have a longer outage.

So after a few minutes of Jeremie showing the Pro406 who was boss…. we elected to make the jump to the E-Class.

We decided to make the jump since most of the rules and routing had already been built by Jeremie for our tests.  So about an hour later we were back up and running with all mail and web services working well.  (The delay was because we have elected to route all our internally hosted services in and out of our T-1 while our other traffic is load balanced.  Because of this unique route email wasn’t going outbound, but was quickly resolved by a call to support.)

So we made the migration to our new redundant ISPs and expanded bandwidth… with some extra added excitement.

For those who have asked…Yes, we are planning to sell our recently decommissioned Pro 4060 (after we get the reboot loop resolved under our support contract, of course!).  Let me know if you would like to have an opportunity to purchase this 1 1/2 year old gear.

Great job to my staff!  Jim & Jeremie you guys are great! (Linda you are too, but well you were off playing, partying and having fun at the ACS Convention and missed all the excitement.)

Hardware, SonicWall