Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers vs. Fortinet Wireless LAN

for well suited, with all these big organizations you can have regional or distributed controller base. I think this is better and then you can consolidate things. All this whole infrastructure to the single locations. Not be a good fit? If you have a small organizations then yeah, maybe some other traditional physical controller.

Incentivized

Fortinet offers great Security features and is one of the leaders on that, and integrating Wireless LAN infrastructure with Access points proved to work rather seamlessly. Ease of management, single platform and ability to customize licensing as per needs were elements in favor of adding the Wireless LAN solution from Fortinet to our security portfolio.

Incentivized

• I guess it's very good at managing large scale deployments because I can change configuration on basically all of our devices at once if I want to. It gives us a quick and easy overview of all of the clients, all of the healthy status of our devices.
• It's very good at troubleshooting because it pulls logs from a hardware level, whereas otherwise we'd have to log into each device ourselves and get those logs. It does that automatically.

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• Really easy to configure
• Really easy to manage
• Great value for price

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• If possible, please add a column for WAP Name and WAP Model within the 2.4/5/6 GHz radio sections, as we have different models of WAPs in the fleet, and it would be easier to identify WAPs within a building.
• We conduct digital exams for our students. If there is a way to identify clients and block traffic for applications like ChatGPT, it would be greatly appreciated. Currently, there is no filter for ChatGPT or generative AI.

Incentivized

• In the web portal, it would be nice if you could create a customer, assign that customer all the devices in the solution, and have a single pane glass to manage them all. Right now you need to access different web links to manage the devices.
• The security feature set could be a bit more sophistication, like an Arista AP which polices the air.

Incentivized

Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution

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It's not simple, but this is the result of being very deeply configurable

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High availability options are very good. You have multiple options so you can select whichever suits you well. Also you can mix it up if you have more controllers so your downtime risk decreases sharply. Users will not feel any connection issues thanks to powerful and flexible high availability options that Cisco provides.

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While it works well in general, there are some bugs in both the GUI and functionality. It has caused spikes of downtime in our network. The HA also is quite cumbersome and specific to set up, while not having the most reliable working around.

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When it's a config issue, TAC is usually useful. If it's some bug and BU needs to be involved, it might take forever.

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Fortinet offers excellent support. They will work with you until the solution is doing what it is designed to do, within its capabilities. They also do an excellent to follow-up with the end-user prior to closing the ticket.

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You need to understand wifi basics

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Not much yet. In my experience from becoming a network engineer four-ish years ago to now, like I said, I used that 5520, which was a Cisco product. These 9800 are a lot smaller and tinier and they seem to do a lot more that the other ones couldn't do. It's a good product.

Incentivized

as a stand-alone product, the Fortinet wireless LAN solution isn't the most powerful, nor compelling out there. Others, like Cisco Meraki, offer great products, with added wifi features at a similar price point, but where Forti shines, is when integrated into a network with firewall enablement such as FortiGate. Overall, it stacks up well with others and is a solution that needs to be evaluated in a purchasing project.

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There are different vesrions for different requirements, there's HA as well.

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• I think that it has had a positive impact, especially with the dashboard being a university. The 9800 dashboard gives us one spot where we can go to see how many clients are on each of our SSIDs or perhaps client utilization. We've dashboard may be saying, Hey, you have one building that has 90 people connected to one access point. So that gives us the information we need to go in and expand that coverage or add in some high density to address those issues.

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• Less management cost
• Less expensive to buy

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