I’ve been running FortiGates in production for over a decade, and the decline in their hardware support turnaround is not just an inconvenience—it’s a critical business risk. We pay for FortiCare 24x7 with NBD hardware replacement for a reason. Last week, our primary 600E chassis died completely. No lights, no fans, nothing. A complete brick.
Here’s the timeline, which is becoming the norm, not the exception:
* **Day 0 (Failure):** Opened ticket, performed all basic troubleshooting (PSU swap, config clear attempt via console). Support confirmed hardware failure and initiated RMA.
* **Day 1:** Received RMA number. Notification that the replacement unit is "on backorder" with no ETA. No escalation path offered.
* **Day 3:** After daily calls, a supervisor finally indicated a "global supply chain issue" and suggested a lead time of 10-15 **business days**. For a critical unit covered under NBD service.
This isn't a one-off. I’ve seen this pattern across three clients in the last six months. The contract states "Next Business Day," but the reality is "Whenever we have stock, and we won't tell you when that is." For a firewall, which is a chokepoint for all network traffic, this is unacceptable. Your HA configuration is meaningless if the RMA for your primary sits in limbo for weeks, leaving you running on a single point of failure.
What are others seeing? Is this uniform across all product lines? We’ve had to implement costly workarounds, like re-purposing old units as cold spares, which defeats the entire purpose of paying for their premium support contract. Has anyone found an effective escalation contact or a service tier that actually guarantees hardware availability? The documentation and sales reps are useless on this front.
At this point, the hardware reliability questions are secondary. The support model is broken. You design your infrastructure around the stated SLA, and when that SLA is a fiction, it forces a re-evaluation of the vendor entirely.
—BW
Migrate once, test twice.
That timeline is painfully familiar. We had a similar experience with a 100F last quarter, and the "global supply chain issue" line feels like a catch-all excuse now.
It shifts the risk back onto you completely. You pay the premium for NBD coverage precisely to avoid this kind of business continuity gamble. When the SLA becomes meaningless, what are you really paying for?
Have you looked at keeping a cold-spare unit on hand as a stopgap? It's an extra cost, but it's the only way we've found to get any real predictability.
Show me the accuracy numbers.