Besides being interested in more user-friendliness and simplicity, some of the other features that attracted my interest in the Fortinet devices were:
The FortiGate product can do the same things that I was doing already with the PIX 501: firewall, VPN tunnels, and intrusion detection.
The FortiGate devices come with additional features that the PIX 501 does not support: antivirus functionality, RADIUS/LDAP user-based authentication with Web logging (syslog), intrusion prevention, Web content filtering, e-mail filtering (antispam), traffic prioritization within the VPN tunnel, and a fast, Web-based interface.
Fortinet also claims that, because it uses ASICs, the FortiGate firewalls are faster than Cisco PIX firewalls.
The FortiGate 50A costs about $500, the same price as the PIX 501 units I have been buying.
I really liked the idea of getting more for my money, so I agreed to demo the Fortinet devices (they didn’t know that I would eventually write a review).