The FortiConverter firewall configuration migration tool is primarily for third-party firewall configuration migration to FortiOS—for routing, firewall, NAT, and VPN policies and objects.
N/A
Oracle GoldenGate
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) GoldenGate is a managed service providing a real-time data mesh platform, which uses replication to keep data highly available, and enabling real-time analysis.
Unless you are rebuilding rules from scratch, FortiConverter is a must-have when migrating legacy rulesets from competing platforms such as Cisco ASA, CheckPoint, Juniper, etc. to FortiGate Appliances. Without FortiConverter, guaranteed there will be some flows you missed and you will be troubleshooting them during your cutover maintenance window. Utilizing FortiConverter, you will minimize such issues as cutover time because you have the ability to stage the new ruleset in advance. Complex topologies and multi-platform migrations require highly skilled consultation from experts that [have] done this several times before.
I think it's a great product. We apply Oracle GoldenGate to several use cases in our organization. 1. Business Continuity Planning, 2. Query Offloading through data replication to a reporting instance of our data, 3. looking into data transformations to help support various queries for different teams within the business.
FortiConverter is currently the best option to assist in migrating legacy firewalls to FortiGate firewalls. FortiConverter is flexible enough to be the single tool to use when migrating Check Point, Cisco ASA, Juniper and other platforms to FortiGate Firewalls. FortiConverter is not a multi-user software however it is easy for multiple engineers to work on a single or multiple migration projects.
Once set up, it's very easy to use and keep running, it's getting to that point that can make it cumbersome to some. Also, depending on the data that you want to replicate, the configuration files can become quite cumbersome to maintain. Learning curve can be high for some who are not as experienced with databases and transactions.
Oracle Support for Oracle GoldenGate has been quite responsive and quite helpful in the few situations where we've needed it. Furthermore, the documentation on Oracle GoldenGate is so good that we often do not need to contact support with issues as the fix is already documented and able to be run by us without needing to open a ticket.
We've had Oracle consultants come as well for training days to talk about new features, parts of Oracle GoldenGate we may not be using and things of that nature. The consultants they send are great as they're very knowledgeable about all things Oracle GoldenGate and great resources for any questions or concerns you may have with the product.
We used Oracle University for our Oracle Golden Gate Training and it was top notch. We were able to turn our whole DBA team to Oracle GoldenGate newbies to Oracle GoldenGate troubleshooting experts in a matter of a few days, while this obviously did not come cheap, the company felt that it was worth the investment.
If Oracle GoldenGate is new to your organization, expose as many DBAs as possible to it. Having your whole team fluent in it will overcome early operational hurdles and allow it to more quickly become an accepted and supported part of your supported platform for your team that will enable the business to use it to its fullest.
FortiConverter is the easiest of the firewall migration tools to use compared to Checkpoint SmartMove, Cisco Firewall Migration Tool, FWMIG, etc. It has a more robust user interface and allows you to customize the rule imports as needed. Rulebase analysis, hit count, NAT, and dynamic routing are presented in an easy to understand format with FortiConverter.
We use Oracle Data Guard as a backup tool, but not for data replication. Data Guard is not suited for real-time data replication in our non-normalized reporting database nor for the database we are using for our upgrade project, as Data Guard is not able to transform data and is not able to synchronize data into different schemas, which is necessary for our project. Additionally, our project database is on Oracle 12g not 11i: I am not 100% sure Data Guard is able to replicate from 11i to 12g
Have never had any issues with scaling Oracle GoldenGate itself, however Oracle GoldenGate Monitor does have scaling issues, but with Oracle GoldenGate now able to be monitored by Oracle Enterprise Manager, this is no longer an issue, in my opinion.
In earlier versions, DDL support was limited as well as the need of primary key constraints in the source tables. This made me create partitions, sub-partitions, truncatations and perform other operations upon they are performed in source systems and I need to discuss with source system administrators and need to convince them to let them create primary keys for replicated tables.
But both issues are solved now.
Installation is straightforward, easy.
Deployed everything within Oracle Data Integrator.
Developing 1000 of ODI interfaces for loading into Operational Data Store took not more than 100 man/days. But, adding them to Golden Gate is taking not more than 5 man/days.
Management Pack and VeriData are additional packs for your management and data verification needs.
