A10 Networks Thunder ADC Reviews

A10 Networks Thunder ADC can be deployed on-premise or virtually.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is used for global load balancing.

The most valuable features in A10 Networks Thunder ADC are the ease of configuration, user-friendliness, and simplicity to sell to customers.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC could improve on the Application Delivery Controller. it's not a fully-fledged web application firewall solution. For example, application data and support need to improve.

I have been using A10 Networks Thunder ADC for approximately two years.

The stability of A10 Networks Thunder ADC is good.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is scalable.

We have approximately a team of six using A10 Networks Thunder ADC.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC has a very good support structure. In each region, they have a very well-experienced team to support when it comes to pre-sales. They have a very capable team.

The setup of A10 Networks Thunder ADC is very straightforward. If everything is in order, onboarding one application can be done in a few hours.

The price of A10 Networks Thunder ADC depends on capacity and the customer's requirement. They have several offerings. They have different price models and options to choose from. Additionally, you need to subscribe to support for the hardware appliances.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is a very natural solution in the industry. When compared to the other vendors, it's easier to use, more user-friendly, and more mature.

I rate A10 Networks Thunder ADC a nine out of ten.

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.

Compared to F5, which I used about six years ago, the A10 is much easier when routing. You don't have to use the wildcard bits to route it between the different segments. It's much less troublesome to configure.

A10 Networks also doesn't have separate licenses for some features. All licenses are already onboard, which is not the case with F5. It's called the GTM on F5 and on A10 it's GSLB. The DNS load balancing is globally based and that isn't a separate license. That's already on the box in the ADC license itself.

The solution's traffic flow management capabilities are quite easy to use and quite good, and our ability to troubleshoot traffic flow issues is good if you know how to read the packet captures. If you know your way around the command prompt, it's fine.

We've got the solution's support for expanding infrastructure to public, private, and hybrid cloud containers for our internal data center, and we're also balancing some things we've got in AWS. That's only available internally. That scales well, especially the virtualization with the A10s. You can split it up into 32 separate units.

The solution's support for our on-premise applications is good. It's very flexible. You can split it up into different Layer 3 partitions: internal- or external-facing. Or you can use it as a separate partition for testing.

There is room for improvement in the GUI. I just migrated from the 2.7 software train to the 4.1, and there are still people on 2.7. The latter is a very old GUI if you compare it to F5. It's not as easy to use and a lot of things are missing. 

They've made a lot of improvements in the 4.1 step, but compared to the ease of use of F5, it's still quite difficult. For people who haven't got a lot of experience, the GUI can be quite challenging.

We've been using the Thunder ADC product for nearly six years.

I've never had any trouble. There have been some bugs in some software-release trains, but there were no production issues as a result.

We have between 1,500 and 3,000 users connecting to the appliances daily. Administration-wise, there are two network admins but we're not required to look at it because we've got our daily monitoring alerts.

For our new applications, all load balancing is being done on the A10s. In terms of increasing our usage, there are still some new applications on our roadmap that are being developed. They will replace other applications that are not load balanced at the moment. The replacement will be load balanced so we plan to put more things behind them.

It scales well. I haven't found any inconsistencies between the data sheets and the hardware specs. For our purposes, we haven't run into any degraded performance or the like.

A10's technical support is very good. Most of the time we go through our support partner, but you can also send an email straight to A10 support and, most of the time, within one to two hours, you get a response.

Initially, I got support directly with the vendor and that was fine. Now, we've also got a support partner. I haven't any experience with them yet because we just engaged them with the new units. But my direct experience with A10 was quite good.

The primary reasons that we switched to A10 were that F5 wasn't 46-bit hardware-capable yet, at the time, and because of the licensing. For what we wanted to do with our replacement parts, we would have had to migrate to a much more expensive and higher-end hardware model at that size. And support-wise, F5 is about five times more expensive than A10 is.

Overall, at the time, we were quite happy with F5. But we were looking around and came across A10 and did a proof of concept with them. Price-wise, it was very interesting and hardware-wise as well.

The initial setup was quite straightforward, but take into account that I've been using it for a long time. 

If you come from a Cisco background and you switch to F5, it's quite a big step. A10 is more like a Cisco IOS, in terms of the CLI. The F5 is more Junos OS, CLI-wise. So for me, the migration from F5 to A10 — because we use a lot of Cisco as well, internally — and the setup of A10, was quite easy. The commands are quite similar for configuring the interfaces.

For the migration five or six years ago took, the initial deployment took about two or three days to get the failover and everything else working. The migration itself for about 70 VIPs, took about a month. My recent migration from one unit to the other unit took about two weeks, taking into account the different departments and getting a service window to migrate things.

In terms of our implementation strategy, as is, from the one A10 to the other A10, everything we're load balancing was just a copy-paste and then we made some hardware improvements because we have more 10-GB interface capabilities. We can split the load better between a separate Layer 3 core and our ACI data center core.

We did it ourselves, but we had a review of the initial configurations and migration steps from A10 Professional Services, and that took about two hours. Our experience with them was quite good.

We have seen ROI from going with A10. Part of that was the ease of configuration, but that's because most of the other network engineers also have a Cisco background, and they had never done anything with the F5 solution before. So it was quite easy for them to get used to configuring it. And in the support contract, we saved a lot of money, on the order of $15,000 to $20,000 a year.

As for the initial investment in the hardware, F5 and A10 are quite similar now. For the current A10 solution, the initial cost was about $36,000. As for annual support, the F5 solution would be between $10,000 and $12,000, while the A10 is $2,200 a year for support.

In terms of A10's security features, the web application firewall handles the top 10 OWASP use cases. But the ATM on the F5 is much more enhanced or comprehensive. For pure load balancing and the normal security features, both solutions are okay. They are easy to configure for simple setups.

The biggest lesson I have learned using the ADC solution is the ease of routing between the different segments that are behind the solution, compared to F5.

You have to look at your use cases for load balancing and how much you want to have influence from the traffic. In my opinion, there are only two solutions that are very close to each other, the F5 and the A10, in terms of the way you can influence your traffic. Then it comes down to the price. Security-wise, they each have different angles for how you set it up.

We don't use A10's FlexPool consumption-based licensing model. We have some VM test units. We would have to bring our own license if we wanted to host it in the cloud. That's another subscription model that we haven't used.

In terms of the solution's single-pane-of-glass view, you actually you need the Harmony analytics to see everything. You can see everything that is configured on, but to get the most out of the monitoring part, you have to have Harmony with it. With Nagios and Zabbix, etc., you have to do a lot of OED searching to get all the collect counters for your service groups.

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

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

Feature-wise, A10 Networks Thunder ADC is better for troubleshooting. I like the solution's command line to troubleshoot the issues, especially compared to other vendors. So in comparison with the others, it's much easier to troubleshoot.

Currently, the solution's WAF features are fewer. They should consider increasing their WAF features. Also, for better customization, they can improve the WAF features. I would like to see better customization in the future release of the solution. The performance of multiple boxes in the solution regarding memory and caches needs to be improved.

I have been using A10 Networks Thunder ADC for five years. Also, I am using the solution's latest version. As of now, I am a customer and end-user of the product.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten because other vendors provide better LB and WAF features. So, the WAF features are not up to the mark in A10 Networks Thunder ADC.

The solution's technical support is helpful. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten. Whenever there is something urgent or critical, even though the technical team may take some time to respond, like, around 30 mins, they will respond.

Positive

Currently, I use Bitrix24, F5, and Radware.

The solution's initial setup process was easy. For the installation, it takes around five minutes.

One person can do the maintenance since it is not required much. So, it's a one-time solution, and its maintenance is fine. The number of people required for maintenance depends on the clients as well. One or two engineers are fine to serve around a hundred clients. If you have a number of devices, more people are needed for their maintenance because of the patching it requires during regular operations. Only for the maintenance, one engineer's fine. However, for regular operations, we need multiple people.

There is no help needed with the installation part since people can do it themselves. The solution gets deployed on a private cloud and on-premises.

The pricing is fine, considering the features they are providing. If you are an individual user, they'll price the product differently compared to how they price the product that is sold to an organization.

I will recommend A10 Networks Thunder ADC to those requiring a load balancing solution. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to enhance our client's connection to their data centers. One data center is in Brasilia and the other is in Sao Paulo. The solution bolsters the connection between the data centers.  

The DNS application firewall and load balancing are very valuable. 

A graphical dashboard for analyzing performance is needed. Sometimes, it is necessary to use the CLI to see connections. 

I have been using the solution for five years. 

The solution is very, very stable with no issues. I rate stability a ten out of ten. 

The solution is scalable by adding new appliances. 

I contacted support once by opening a query on their website and it was answered quickly. My experience with support was excellent. 

The setup is easy. 

We contracted with a partner for deployment which was completed in one day. 

The solution costs less than its competitors. 

We evaluated five equipment options for our client and prices were very different. Technically, the options were comparable so we chose the solution because it was the least expensive. 

The solution is good and I never have any issues because of the equipment. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our clients are using it for their entire network. They have multiple networks across India. They are using it for application load balancing. 

They have multiple servers. 

The customers are using all the features. It's got a good set of features. 

It is a stable solution.

The product is easy to set up. 

It's scalable. 

Technical support has been helpful. 

I'm not sure what improvements can be made. I'm a reseller. I don't deal with the solution directly.

We've had a customer that wanted to use an IPsec VPN and we haven't been able to put the two together.

The license does not come along with it, so you have to purchase everything separately. 

The costs can be quite high.

We've used the solution for one year.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product can scale. It's not an issue. 

Technical support is good. It's very prompt. My customer had a support problem.

Positive

The initial setup is not complex. It's rather straightforward. 

I'd rate the product five out of five in terms of ease of setup. 

The product has been very good, and, until now, the customer is not facing any problems. They have been happy with the product.

How long the deployment takes depends on the customer and the scenario. In my case, I had it up and running in three or four months with no downtime whatsoever. Typically, it can be a one-day job. 

We pay a licensing fee on a yearly basis.

The pricing is okay. As far as other products are concerned, it is quite pricey, however.

I'm a reseller for A10.

This is one of the best products. It is capable. I'll always suggest it for my customers as it is better than the other products. If you compare to other products, it's a one box solution, as we say. Everything comes in the one box, and that's the beauty of this product.

I'd rate the product ten out of ten. 

We are in the government sector and we use this solution for load balancing and application management.

The solution is user-friendly and the CLA troubleshooting is easier compared to other solutions.

There are competitors that have more features.

In a future release, I would like to see VAS, application policy management, profiling, and the SSL encryption and decryption features should be on the system instead of having a separate SSLi system. Additionally, they should combine the products into one solution instead of having separate products, such as encryption and decryption, and load balancing.

I have been using the solution for approximately four years.

The technical support is good.

I previously used F5 BIG-IP.

The implementation is easy.

The price of the maintenance support is too expensive.

I have evaluated Avi Networks.

If someone has experience in Cisco Networks, the CLA hierarchy and configuration are 90% the same making this solution easier to use.

I rate A10 Networks Thunder ADC a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is for servicing a remote workforce. Especially these days when a lot of people are working remotely, a solution like this is important. We have to deploy applications and we do not necessarily want to upload the applications into the cloud or locally on desktops or laptops. ADC is really good for desktop virtualization and application delivery. Instead of having a full client, you look at a projection hosted in the data center. All the processing is being done back in the data center in the corporate domain. Because of the fact that the processing is not being taken care of locally, ADC is a very lightweight client that handles the feed on your laptop. It also enhances security.  

Everything is kept in the server room, not exported locally to someone's house or whatever location they are working in. You do not have to worry about securing the data. There are certain programs that you have to patch a lot, like Adobe Flash — which seems to always need a patch. Instead of doing that on all 100 laptops that are in the field, you just do it once in the data center and everybody uses that same version. That type of simplification for your deployments is another benefit of ADC.  

Because the maintenance is all happening at the data center, it is a lot more controlled and it is way easier. Another thing that this helps with is that only certain people get access to certain applications. The accountants are really the only ones who need access to the accounting software. It is really easy to set up groups based upon Active Directory and then define who gets access to those applications. That ability to limit access is really kind of cool and can potentially save money and licensing costs.  

The most valuable parts of this product have to do with the efficiency of deployments and data security.  

Everybody says Network Thunder works as advertised. It is just one of those things that actually performs as advertised. I take no news as good news. I do not really have any negatives. We usually like to get well-balanced reviews from people who have experience with the product and especially from the vendors themselves.  

As far as improvements, that may be different than things that are missing or broken. I just do not have any cons. I do not have any glaringly big needs for additions either. One thing that might be improved is the interface. I think it is pretty straightforward. It is just not the prettiest, but it is functional. That is getting pretty granular.  

Maybe one concrete thing that they can improve on is their two-factor authentication. Just do something to make the native solution more robust. That would probably be the one thing that I have heard mentioned. They have basic two-factor authentication. It is also nice that they have options for integrating with other two-factor products. The problem with that is that then you have to buy two products and license two solutions. One customer made a comment saying that it would be nice if we only had to buy one product to take care of the whole solution. In other words, they thought it would be better to just be able to buy the A10 and not buy two products to create the two-factor authentication they would have preferred. That should be something that A10 could at least offer.  

We have been selling A10 ADC (Application Delivery Controller) over the past couple of years. We have been selling the load balancer for going on nine years.  

There are not really any nagging glitches or any kind of little ongoing annoying problems. Certainly, there are none that I have experienced and not that I have heard of from people using it. If there are ever any issues they are just normal, temporary issues that you expect when you work with technology. That is if you can consider anything that is a glitch to be normal.  

If we are talking about load balancing, then I can speak more about stability issues. But the Network Thunder ADC has mostly been very good. There was an issue a few years back with one of my customers and A10 addressed the problem and took care of it promptly. Isolated incidents can have to do with a lot of things within a larger architecture. It would be a problem with the architecture then, and not the product.   

We never really tried to scale the internal initial deployment hands-on. It has been left as is. More users have been added over time but nothing so crazy that it really required some type of scaling of the product. This company is a little over a hundred users. They are all using it remotely, from home, daily.  

Roles for the users are just all over the board.  

For just Network Thunder, I have not had to deal with the A10 technical support team. Our clients never said anything about how they like it one way or another. I assume that means they have not had to contact them either. There has just been one load balancing issue a client had and it was isolated to that location. A10 took care of it. They are one for one as far as tackling problems I know about.  

The installation is absolutely straightforward. Nothing more to say about that.  

As far as how many people are usually required to maintain it, in this company it is just one technician for 100 people using the product. His role is probably considered a straight system admin. It would not be a senior tech or even someone dedicated to the product.  

I can just say that it is cheaper than other solutions that are supposed to do the same thing. That is actually one of the reasons that customers chose it.  

It is a pretty good product. On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate A10 Networks Thunder ADC as a nine-out-of-ten. I do not get too many complaints from customers. Giving it a nine seems fair. It works as advertised.   

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.

One of the features that we really like is the services map, which is a way that we map traffic from the front-end virtual server to the back-end servers. 

Another feature we like is application switching. I'm using this as a template. 

A lot of our SSL management is done on the front-end side, so there is one pane of glass for a lot of our security certificates. It gives us visibility. It also falls under when certificates are going to expire. Even for servers that are coming down, we can see how that affects the traffic flow by using the services map.

Each release of the code is becoming more polished, not that I find it difficult today. I'm glad to see the features and enhancements we request are making it into every release. It is very simple to use.

We are starting to do a lot with containers and how the solution hooks into Kubernetes that we haven't explored. I'm hoping that they have a lot of hooks into Kubernetes. That would be the part for improvement: Marketing use cases with containers.

We are on our second set of boxes. For Thunder ADC, we have been using it since 2015 for probably four to five years now. 

The stability of the solution is really good.

There are fewer than 25 people deploying and maintaining this solution. Most of them are application engineers.

It scales well. We are using the hardware appliance. For us to scale up, we buy new hardware. We always buy bigger than what we need so that way we can grow into it.

Internally, we have close to 600 people using it. Externally, we have 400,000 to 500,000 active members who pass data through the device. Typically, everything is web browsing or API calls.

We do not have plans to increase usage at this time, but with the cloud coming up, that is a possibility.

The on-premise support is really good. From a support standpoint, if we have problems or anything like that, usually the case is solved within 24 hours. There have not been too many that went over that time frame. Obviously, that is key to keeping things up and running. We have fast resolution. 

The device is really solid and we don't need a lot of support. We may have one case a year, if that. This also speaks to how we're using the device. We just haven't hit a lot of bugs in the code or a lot of problems that we can't solve onsite.

We previously used a Microsoft solution. We switched because A10 has a lot more options. It is like day and night.

I would put the initial setup at an intermediate level. It is nothing that someone will be able to unbox and do without having some networking or application knowledge. However, if you have a firm IT understanding, then it is pretty simple.

Adding new things takes under 30 minutes.

A10 did not assist with our initial deployment, but I would tell everyone else to do that.

We do have an implementation process that people follow, but it is handled by another team.

I believe we have seen ROI. I don't regret our decision to purchase it.

I think people are scared to take a look at A10 because they're not F5. Now, F5 is their biggest competition. You get a lot more for your dollar with A10. So, I would tell people to give A10 a strong look.

We did try out the solution’s Harmony analytics and visibility controller for its one-year trial. Due to the cost, we chose not to keep it onsite.

We just pay for support in addition to our licensing.

We also evaluated F5. 

Because we were new in the market, our decision was purely based on cost. A10 can deliver the throughput we need, so there wasn't a technical challenge. It ended up being a cost-based decision.

Start off with Professional Services. It doesn't hurt to get 40 hours of Professional Services to help you stand it up. Usually, that's all you need. It is not a lot of hours. A week's worth of help goes a long way.

We can troubleshoot the traffic flow using the services map. Then, we can get flow data out of the device. So, I would rank the solution’s traffic flow management capabilities as adequate.

We plan to implement these technologies or strategies in the next three years: move from hardware appliances to software/scale-out solutions, DDoS protection, upgrade TLS/SSL capabilities to modern PFS/ECC encryption standards, and move to Office 365. DDoSs prevention is something that we're looking into. The web application firewall in the A10 is an option that we're exploring. SSL for strengthening our ciphers has been put on us by more of the user community, as we want to ensure our data is secure. Then, I see us moving more to a hybrid cloud model over the next three years, having more systems in the cloud and less on-prem.

We consider these benefits most important when funding new technology: revenue generation, cost savings, and operational improvements.

We haven't ventured into the solution’s support for expanding infrastructure to public, private, and hybrid cloud containers yet, but we will be.

We don't use a lot of the security features.

There is always room for improvement. I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).