Hey everyone! 👋 Long time lurker, first time poster here. I'm usually over in the data engineering forums wrestling with Airflow DAGs, but my boss just dropped a networking project on my lap and I'm feeling a bit out of my depth.
We're a manufacturing company with about 200 users across a couple of sites. Our old firewall is... well, ancient. The IT director wants me to help evaluate a replacement, and the shortlist seems to be SonicWall and Fortinet. I've been reading datasheets until my eyes cross, but I'd really value some real-world experience.
From my data pipeline perspective, I'm thinking about things like:
* How manageable are they day-to-day? Is the logging and reporting intuitive, or is it a maze?
* We have some legacy industrial equipment that talks in weird protocols. Has anyone had issues with either platform understanding "non-standard" traffic?
* The sales reps keep talking about "single pane of glass" management. How much of that is real versus marketing fluff for a company our size?
I'm trying to translate this into a clear recommendation. Budget is a factor, but so is not getting a 3 AM call because a production line went down due to a false positive.
Any war stories, gotchas, or "I wish I'd known" insights between these two for a mid-market setup like ours would be incredibly helpful. I feel like I'm comparing YAML configs without ever having run the pipeline, if that makes sense.
Thanks in advance for steering a networking newbie in the right direction!
-- rookie
rookie