FatPipe or Radware progress… sort of.
Progress or lack there of…
Well our Demos of FatPipe and Radware arrived.. both companies did a great job getting the hardware here quickly… one interesting note the Radware box shipped straight from Jerusalem where their factory is.. that was interesting getting a box with Hebrew writing on it.
Well both vendors have matched each others price, so the playing field is pretty much the same. Each have supplied two devices for redundancy. For both the second box was less than 25% of the first box, so it seems logical to run the devices in a pair… Seeing one major reason for this device is to provide fault tolerance in our ISP connections in addition to load balancing.
So the reason for the lack of progress is our Cable provider just finished installing the cable run from the road for our new service. First the thawing snow made the ground to soft, then they delayed because it was too cold, then this week the soil was frozen, now late this week it was just right… I’ll just call Insight/Comcast the 3 bears.
I must say Radware continues to impress me, our Sales rep called and asked which days he could come down from Chicago and help us configure and install the LinkProof hardware. He said he would like to spend an afternoon and morning with us getting everything setup. Granted, this doesn’t mean their product is better, but I was really pleased to hear they would travel 6 hours round trip to help us get it configured to have a ’successful’ demo. This is currently more than I can say for FatPipe, they just sent the boxes and said to call them with questions.
So yesterday Jeremie installed the FatPipe hardware (photos soon) and the boxes look very clean in the rack… but several initial concerns:
- Since we elected to request the 1U version of the FatPipe, there are only 4 ports on the hardware. We were expecting a device expandable to 12 ports. Our FatPipe rep said that he made a mistake…”I made a mistake & thought the 1 U boxes could handle 12 ports. Sorry.” Its ok I suppose, but that is on minor disappointment. One note if you want the expandable version, you are going to have to coincide over 8u’s of rack space to the FatPipe hardware… ouch.
- The FatPipe rack rails that shipped with the hardware are way too small for a normal rack. Even when we expanded them as far as possible the rack rails don’t reach the back of the mounting brackets. Now I will note, you can expand them far enough if you adjust the front of the rails, but then the front of the FatPipe hardware sits 5 inches back into the front of the rack.. not exactly normal rack mounting.
- FatPipe tech support is now saying we will need a second firewall for the hardware to live behind…
So will that that said, we are running the FatPipe thru the tests… And Radware staff is on-site Friday to get their gear configured… more info to come.