Fortinet FortiGate 1801F-DC FortiCare Premium to Elite Upgrade, 5-Year (FC-10-D18F1-204-02-60)

A FortiGate 1801F-DC already running FortiCare Premium gets a firm 1-hour response window on critical cases; FC-10-D18F1-204-02-60 moves that same DC-powered chassis onto FortiCare Elite for five years, tightening the critical-issue commitment to 15 minutes and adding the extended end-of-engineering support window plus the Elite monitoring portal. This SKU is an upgrade, not a fresh support contract, so it requires an active FortiCare Premium subscription on the device before it can be applied.

What the Premium-to-Elite upgrade changes on the 1801F-DC

The FortiGate 1801F-DC shares the NP7 network processor and CP9 content processor of its AC sibling, paired with dual -48V/-60V DC inputs and 2x 960GB onboard NVMe SSD, which is why it tends to land in central offices and telecom equipment rooms rather than a standard server room. Layering this upgrade on top of an existing Premium subscription:

• 15-minute critical response: down from Premium’s 1-hour commitment, so a service-impacting case on the chassis gets a technician engaged in under a quarter hour.
• Extended LTS support: Elite extends the firmware and engineering support window beyond Fortinet’s standard end-of-engineering-support date, useful on a chassis that stays in service through multiple firmware cycles.
• Elite monitoring portal: added visibility into open cases and device health beyond the standard FortiCare case portal.
• Everything Premium already covers stays in place: 24x7x365 TAC access, advance hardware replacement, and Priority RMA add-on eligibility carry over unchanged.

The table below lines up the resulting Elite coverage against Essential and Premium on the points that matter day to day. This SKU is what moves a Premium-covered 1801F-DC into the Elite column:

Who upgrades a DC-powered 1801F to Elite

Running on -48V/-60V plant power instead of mains AC is usually a sign the chassis sits in a central office, cable head-end, or other telecom facility where a site visit takes longer to arrange and every minute of an outage carries a service-level cost. Teams in that position are the ones most likely to pay for the drop from a 1-hour response to 15 minutes: it is the difference between a technician joining a bridge call while the issue is still being diagnosed versus after the queue has already backed up. Five years locks that tighter SLA in for the chassis’s full support lifecycle without a mid-term renewal.

Activation and delivery

This order is a license only, applied against an existing FortiCare Premium subscription already tied to the FortiGate 1801F-DC’s serial number; no hardware ships with it. DataCenter360.ca issues the upgrade contract electronically, typically the same business day, so Elite coverage activates in the FortiCare portal without waiting on a shipment. Delivery is worldwide with no regional restriction on the license itself, even though the hardware it protects ships Canada-only.

Upgrade vs. buying Elite from day one

If a FortiGate 1801F-DC is not yet under any FortiCare contract, buying FortiCare Premium first (FC-10-D18F1-247-02-60) and applying this upgrade afterward costs more in total than some FortiCare Elite SKUs sold outright for the same term, so it is worth confirming current coverage before ordering. This upgrade path exists specifically for chassis that already carry Premium and need to move up mid-cycle, commonly triggered by a change in uptime requirements or a contractual SLA the current 1-hour response no longer satisfies.

Buying from DataCenter360.ca

DataCenter360.ca processes FortiCare tier upgrades alongside net-new subscriptions for enterprise FortiGate chassis, including DC-powered units like the 1801F-DC that see less order volume than standard AC models. Before the upgrade contract is issued, the existing Premium subscription and device serial are confirmed, which avoids the activation errors that come from applying an upgrade to a device without the prerequisite tier already in place.