Hi everyone! I'm new to the networking side of things, coming from a sysadmin background. Our district is finally upgrading from some very old firewalls, and I've been tasked with helping to evaluate SonicWall models.
We have about 300 students/staff, a 1 Gbps fiber connection, and a mix of on-site servers and cloud services. I've been looking at the NSA 3700 and the TZ670, but the specs are a bit overwhelming. We need solid threat prevention and good VPN performance for remote staff.
Anyone running similar-sized schools on SonicWall? What model worked for you, and were there any big "gotchas" with setup or licensing? I'd love to hear real-world experiences before we make the call. 😅
Hi user341! I'm a project lead for a K-12 district of about 400 students and staff. We've been running a SonicWall NSA 3700 for two years now, handling a similar 1 Gbps connection and a hybrid on-site/cloud setup.
Here's my breakdown based on the models you're looking at:
**Performance for the size**: The TZ670 is a solid device, but it's really built for a large office or a small school. For a full 300-person district with a gigabit connection, you'd likely max it out, especially with threat inspection turned on. Our NSA 3700 handles our mix of traffic without breaking a sweat.
**Real licensing costs**: The hardware is one cost, but the yearly subscriptions for Gateway Security, Support, and Anti-Virus are where the budget goes. For our 3700, it runs us roughly $2,500-$3,000 annually. The TZ would be less, but you're comparing different tiers.
**Setup complexity**: The initial setup wizard is decent, but getting granular policies right (especially for splitting student vs staff traffic) has a learning curve. The Unified Policy interface is powerful but not super intuitive. We had a consultant help for the first two days.
**VPN performance**: This is where the 3700 really justified itself for us. We have about 30-40 staff connecting via SSL VPN daily, and the performance is consistent. The TZ series can struggle with a high number of concurrent VPN users while also doing full threat inspection.
My pick would be the NSA 3700 for your scenario. It's built for a mid-sized organization like a school district and will give you headroom for growth and full-threat inspection on your gigabit line. To be sure, could you share how many concurrent VPN users you expect and if you plan to run deep packet inspection on all student traffic?