Contivity 1010 Opinions

[nsantin]

Hi,

What is the general opinion on the Contivity 1010 appliance? We are replacing a Fortigate 60 unit and our vendor is pushing the Contivity solution.

We will be implementing the primary unit to support about 10 VPN clients and use the firewall functions to priority VoIP traffic. We run a BCM 200 and use a number of remote i2050 sets.

In your experience, would you recommend implementing Contivity 1010 as a small-mid size VPN solution?

Is it stable? Robust? Easy to manage? (it is a nortel product, so easy to manage is probably out the window! )

We are finding the Fortigate unreliable and buggy, I want to replace it with something that I can forget about and be confident that it will work.

Thought? Opinions?

Thanks.

 

[biv343]

It works well. I've put in several of them, no major issues.

They are easy to manage (web based) but the web interface is a bit slow. You get used to it though. Not like you're in there every day changing things.

Make sure you get the advanced routing keycode so you can classify your VOIP traffic. The VPN tunnel upgrade keycode will give you up to 30 simultaneous VPN connections. Out of the box you can do 5 simultaneous VPN connections.

Firewall is fairly robust. It's no Checkpoint, but it does a good job.

 

[PederChr]

Contivity is stable, you can use the CLI also to configure.

 

[HungryHouse]

Agree that Contivity is easy to manage and troubleshoot and support from Nortel is excellent (as long as you have a contract).
I prefer the 600 because the help files are far better however, and the cost is not much greater. 600 supports up to 50 tunnels.

 

[VPNSteve]

The 1010/1050/1100 (depending on your needs) are very capable of handling what you describe here.

The Contivity series is very stable, and Nortel support is outstanding (I agree, contract-dependent). As for easy to manage and configure, I have found the contivities to be extremely easy to manage/configure. I have the option of configuring through the CLI or using the GUI. Most of the people I've spoken to who are new to Contivity come in with the assumption that because it's not Cisco, it's difficult. I found that just looking at the CLI, the Contivity is equal to Cisco for ease of configuration, and exceeds Cisco for reliability. The GUI, once you get used to it, makes things FAR easier.