A10 Networks Thunder ADC Reviews

Our primary use case is load balancing, from Layer 4 to Layer 7, on different partitions. And it's also our internet gateway router with our ISP. We're using the standard DDoS protection which is on the box itself.

We have about 91 virtual IP addresses we're load balancing at the moment.

Before A10, we didn't have any load balancing capabilities. Now we use a different partition for the DNS infrastructure with the DNS firewall. The unit uses a separate partition for the internal- and for the external-facing. Before, everything was connected together, and we couldn't split very easily between test, production, and development.

The effect of the solution on our efficiency is that before, we only had round-robin DNS load balancing capabilities, with no health-checking, for example. Or we would have to use network-based load balancing from Microsoft. All that can bring a network down quite quickly, if you configure things incorrectly. With A10, we have a very robust load balancing solution that is capable, like F5, of iRule or aFleX scripting. You can influence the complete packet instead of just a few bytes or bits of the packets, depending on whether it's http or another Layer 4 to Layer 7 traffic flow.

• Load balance web traffic
• Load balance application traffic
• DDoS protection
• Carrier Grade Network (CGN)

We have the ADC product, as well as the CGN.

We are using both the public and private deployment model. We are using AWS as our cloud provider.

It helps us operational when had our DDoS attack. We got a call at two o'clock in the morning one day from one of our service providers that there was a DDoS attack happening against one of our IPs. We looked at the way our network was configured, then we looked into the best way to mitigate it. We knew that our A10 had the capability, but we didn't have it enabled at the time. We called support and were able to get it enabled. Immediately, we stopped that DDoS attack. From an operational perspective, we had a down situation that we were able to quickly resolve and bringing it.

It also helps out a lot, from an operational perspective, when we are load balancing our servers, whether application or web. It is real easy to do a maintenance window. I can go into any of my service groups, then take the servers out of the service group and do maintenance on half of the servers while the other half are still online. I can get all those updated, back up to date, and put all of them back, then take the other half out and update them. So, it allows us to do seamless updates to our servers and application infrastructure.

Our primary use case is the application delivery controller part where we mainly use the server load balancing features to front-end our back-end servers to give us additional high availability, some resiliency, and some failures.

All our applications are hosted on a private on-premises data center. We run our own data center with VMware being the main virtualization platform. Then, running on top of VMware, we have Windows and Linux clusters, so x86 Windows and x86 Linux.

Our biggest security concerns are malicious code, user data theft, DDoS attacks, insider attacks, brand damage/loss of confidence, and phishing/fake sites. Hacking/cyber defacement is one of our concerns, but not the biggest. A lot of these security concerns are around data loss and data loss prevention. We are a pension institution, so we do not want to lose any of our member data. We have security things in place using the application firewalls, as an example, to help with our front-end sites. 

We are running virtual machines and currently doing a proof of concept with containers. However, we're not working with containers on-prem yet.

It was our first step into having high availability. Before, we had a lot of things tied to one server. So, if that server/application were to crash, that would affect our users. By putting A10 Thunder in front of it, this improved our uptime and availability.

Our operations pretty much stayed the same. If anything, people got more relaxed. Because before we only had one server, and if that server went down, then we had to react rather quickly. Having multiple servers now in the APN front-ending it, if a server went down, then there may be three or four other servers sitting there doing the work.

We see a 21 to 50 percent change in traffic typically year-over-year. Our demographic is changing so we have more members who are coming to connect to get their financial statements. So, there is growth of our pension system.

The A10s that we have in Florida are being used for load balancing. We have a pair of A10s there, an active and a standby, and we are balancing the traffic between. We also use our A10s, in general, for provisioning wireless products. Eventually, we will use our new A10s for more stuff.

Our applications are hosted in a private on-premises data center, on public cloud in AWS, and in a hybrid cloud which is primarily public infrastructure.

Among our biggest security concerns are malicious code and DDoS attacks.

We use the monitoring features and security features. The solution will tell us if someone tries to use the wrong password or to hack into the system. We do have firewalls in place so no incoming traffic from the outside can get in. Our firewall blocks everything coming in from the outside, but we can go out to our network.

We use the diagnostics to debug files and, when there is a problem, we can generate a file that we can send to our NOC engineers so they can take a look at it.

We also use the login resource usage which gives us a summary and graphs of services — when things are going down and are up.

The ADCs are pretty straightforward and easy to use. There is a GUI base where you can go in and see everything, but they also have a CLI base where you can use a command and get the information that you want, very fast. You log into the website with the A10 GUI and you can see all of your functions and your health monitor, which is very important. With the health monitor you can see the health of the switch and, if something is going on, how it's progressing. Also upgrading the GUI is very easy. It's user-friendly.

The traffic management is very good. I can monitor the traffic that comes into the A10 very easily. We balance traffic between the active blade and the standby blade. The traffic management is holding its load properly and its balancing properly. It's very good.

In terms of the traffic flow management capabilities, there are graphs that you can look at as you enable them. You can look back at live data for the last 30 minutes and it's very good. I like it. You can manage your traffic easily and you can troubleshoot because, if you look back at your data for the past two weeks, you can see if something was flipping. It's a good feature.

We are using ADC for load balancing. Most of our enterprise applications are behind ADC.

It's on-premise.

It has definitely improved the way our organization performs. Our company is mostly an education institution. We have a campus and an administration where we host all the enterprise applications. With enterprise applications going to six separate entities, it requires a lot of hardware underlying the applications. So load balancing has worked very well.

It definitely has enhanced our application security and our application accessibility. We don't have to go with the original application, the built-in, round-robin kind of thing. The security features, like SSL version 3.0 or TLS 1.2, mean it has pretty good options in the way the application can be configured to make it more secure, as well as the number of servers that are behind it and the way it chooses its servers.

We use it for SLB and GSLB load balancing. We're using the Thunder ADC 1040 but before that we used their AX 2500.

The SLB and GSLB load balancing are the most valuable features. They meet our need to do server-side load balancing and global site load balancing so we can distribute traffic, not only intra-data center, but inter-data center.

We are using them in the cloud and they are flexible, supporting the cloud services that we use. We use Azure.

My primary use case is to use it as a software load balancer. 

Because of the industry that we operate in, we cannot use cloud. Therefore, we use it on-premise. We have 32 medium boxes, and that's what runs production.

A10 explained why the latency dropped significantly on a site that we have.

It gives me information on load balancing and offloading, which provides me information on performance.

Our company uses A10 Networks Thunder ADC for its load balancing capabilities.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC's use has been beneficial for my company.