1

I’m seeing tons of stories that dell “ruined” sonicwall and I am curious as to what specifically they did to them that makes them so “bad” now.

Anyone care to eleborate?

13 Spice ups
2

i heard Dell increased the Price and Licensing structure.

a year back i think we tried to buy a SonicWall Firewall and after receiving the Dell’s quote we dropped the idea.

its 3 times increase than what SonicWall price used to be.

3

I would like to know the same thing as Liz, what is so bad?

4

Our old Dell rep treated SonicWALL as a second class citizen ; it took her weeks to get a quote for support renewal, and another couple weeks to process it. So much so that our support expired, then there was some hassle over reinstating it because “we” didn’t renew on time.

In general, Dell is so large and disorganized that I’m not surprised they messed it up.

2 Spice ups
5

It’s not that the units themselves have gotten worse. It’s all issues with sales and basically dealing with dell. It’s still the same engineering team and manufacturing process(Dell likes to take this over and put in shoddy parts in my experience but haven’t yet).

6

I’ve bought 5 or so TZ205 over the past few months (replacing older TZ’s at branches) and I don’t really see any difference. Prices go up over time which is true of everything.

I don’t really use them to total capacity though so maybe that is why I don’t have a problem with them.

7

I’ve heard that it is support related, but I still get decent support when I need it on my Sonicwall.

8

In addition to what has already been pointed out, let me add that Dell took what was an already flaky customer service and support structure and actually made it worse. SonicPoint line of products on the other hand have been subpar (to say the least) since day one, so at least there’s one thing that isn’t Dells fault.

Omar

9

Follow up by Dell in general is terrible. I started working where I am two years ago. They had Sonicwall and it was my first experience with them. I love the actual product. I contacted Dell in January to say, that I am getting into managed switches and converging all three sites. I need switches and one of the NSA models to handle the load, compared to the 3 TZ-215 units I have.

So we are in July and I have reached out to them 3 times and not gotten any quote. I have a year left on my services on the current hardware so I was hoping they would cut me a deal to stick with them. Their support wait times are pretty bad. I am typically on hold for 4-6 hours. I have heard bad things about creating a ticket and they weren’t getting followed up on but I haven’t done tickets that way.

Once you get to a support technician I have had great success except for one issue regarding the disabling of their spam service. It doesn’t disable. I will have to call their support to get it disabled so I can implement the WatchGuard email security appliance that they never sent me a quote on their email security appliance and I got funding at the last moment. Again, terrible follow up. I actually have talked to 4 different people over the past 7 months to get a quote. There is the potential to get 20+ grand from me next month but it appears they lost that opportunity from their lack of follow up.

It looks like WatchGuard might when the new bid as well. I have had a good experience with the SonicPoints though. I have the built in wireless at HQ plus a sonicpoint and then a sonicpoint at a remote site. I was disappointed to find that the wireless option doesn’t work with their sonicpoint auto configuration so I had to change the SSID names and it looks crappy. I wouldn’t’ have bought the built in wireless if I had known this. I didn’t know to ask and sales team didn’t have enough knowledge to know this existed. The change to email security appliance wasn’t their fault, they just got left out because they never gave me anything to go off of.

So that is my experience so far. I think their support is great and the hardware is great and easy to implement, once you understand it a bit better. Their follow up and hold times are terrible. The worst I have come across so far to be honest.

1 Spice up
10

I don’t think the complaints above are due to Dell purchasing them. I heard these complaints when I first got on the forums originally. 2 yrs ago.

11

Watchguard products give you complete control and their support is amazing. It can be expensive with all of the modules but they have a pack of 7 modules in a bundle for a huge discount compared to purchasing them separately.

12

I’m trying to figure out the best scenario for setting up the WatchGuard email security appliance for testing. I can setup it’s own IP and everything but I have to use a different port because the Sonicwall redirects all port 25 traffic. When I called to get suggestions on this setup, I wasn’t real happy with the response. I had to ask individual questions to know if I was on the right track. I have time but just trying to do it right for testing and then make sure I can move it into my production environment after testing is done, with minor changes.

I need to post that as a question I think.

13

I bought a TZ215 for our shop when we upgraded from SBS2003 to a WS2012 environment last year and had to move away from ISA. It is my first experience with Sonicwall. I bought the thing because a friend recommended it.

So far, the device seems to work OK, but unlike some others here I’ve had bad luck with support. I’ve had to call them twice so far, and each time I had a lot of trouble getting the tech to understand my problem, and each time the tech just seemed to be trying random things to fix the problem rather than troubleshoot the problem in a systematic way. The first time I called I spent half the day on the phone with the guy trying different things, and in the end I figured out the problem myself. The Sonicwall guy didn’t have a clue. In both cases they failed to live up to their response time guarantees for the severity level I specified.

I’m not at all impressed with their documentation either, and I find their support web site hard to navigate. I doubt I would buy another Sonicwall product without looking around for something better first.

14

The last time I had an issue with a TZ200 was when the WorldCup started. The firewall was dropping packets and the latency had increased across all interfaces. The CPU was at 75-100% for much of the time.

The first call to sonicwall was basically them trying to get me to download the swanalyzer trial instead of troubleshooting it with me. I ended up doing that but had to jump through a bunch of hoops with the licensing because it is less than straight-forward. One section of the site says I have unlimited licenses and the other says I didn’t have any. After working with someone on that issue and another in a problem with initial configuration (due to firefox blocking something improperly), I was able to determine that it was the WorldCup watchers and got to see who it was and what domains to block. This whole process was slow and took about a week of back and forth with Dell.

Anyway. I have had good support in the past. They used to have a chat section for tech support that helped me solve a NAT issue causing network-wide slowness when transferring large files, locally. The chat feature has either been completely removed or relocated to a section of the site that I could not find anywhere.

Maybe it is trending downward in terms of quality of support.

15

Wow interesting responses. Sounds like a headache.

16

My experience has been fair to average.

  1. Long hold times

  2. Random disconnects

  3. No callback option instead of waiting on hold

  4. Poor DHCP performance

  5. Poor logging (not all actions we mark to be logged are logged)

  6. Poor site to site VPN throughput.

  7. Poor RDP or TeamViewer through VPN

Overall it is stable, security functions are solid and the ability to lock users/systems down is outstanding.

1 Spice up
17

With SonicWall yes DELL has dropped the ball like they have with most of their other products. When looking for a new SonicWall try talking to a local partner or even places like CDW or Firewalls.com as they will get you your quote quickly and at a price similar to what DELL would quote and these people have some support in place to help out and should be your first line of contact

3 Spice ups
18

Second on the re-seller/partner. Dell have always been Dell to me, salespeople that don’t get back to you when you want a quote. Or salespeople that are so pushy when you aren’t interested in a product/service you’d swear someone was holding a gun to their kids heads with a quota sheet in the other hand. Support has always been good to me though. I’ve been hearing the same problems about Sonicwalls before Dell were involved, at least you can be reasonably sure Dell will be around to honor a support contract.

1 Spice up
19

I read Dell has decided to do away with most of its direct purchasing people and have customers go through resellers. To all the folks who keep complaining about poor Dell salespeople… are you aware of that too?

20

If that is the case they need to let people know. I was only looking to Dell because of my outstanding 1yr of service left for the three devices. To see if they might compensate for moving up in device class. That boat has sailed.