Radware Alteon Reviews

We use it as a load balancer.

It gives our application more resiliency by providing redundancy so that if one server fails, another one can take over and service the website.

And when troubleshooting, Alteon’s analytics have helped me save about half the time it would take me otherwise.

I like the web GUI. It's very intuitive and easy to use.

The reverse proxy piece is a little bit complicated. If the reverse proxy were easier to implement, that would help.

I have been using Radware Alteon for seven years.

It's very stable. It hasn't crashed on me at all.

It's scalable. We can purchase more licenses to accommodate more throughput.

We have it deployed across multiple locations and we have about 20,000 end-users.

Their tech support is very knowledgeable. I've always liked working with the Radware engineering team. They know their stuff.

Positive

We used AppDirectors, which is also from Radware. We switched because AppDirector was old and was end-of-support.

The deployment was pretty straightforward.

In terms of maintenance, every year we try to upgrade the code on the Alteon, but that's about it. It has reduced my maintenance overhead. It's a very low-maintenance system.

I did the whole deployment, along with my boss and one of my colleagues, and we used professional services from Radware. We received training, which was bundled with the purchase.

We have definitely seen return on our investment. It keeps our business more resilient and with higher availability.

The value in it also comes from the fact that how you manage it, and how you create and do things, is a lot easier. It's also more stable.

I needed a couple of months to get familiarized with it.

I'm content with Alteon's pricing.

The licensing is a little bit complicated because it's based on how much bandwidth you want to use, what the throughput is. Instead of having a throughput limit, it just allows whatever the bandwidth is and bases the licensing on vADCs (virtual application delivery controllers) only. That makes it a little bit complicated.

We did a PoC of F5. We chose Alteon based on cost and ease of use. F5 was twice the cost of Alteon at the time, although that was seven years ago.

Radware is not as well known as F5, so maybe the name is a little bit more obscure. That might be a little bit concerning for some people, but it wasn't for me.

You need to understand how to do low balancing and what it does. And you need to think about what types of features you are looking to get out of a product, such as SSL offloading.

I also use Radware's APSolute Vision, which enables me to manage all my devices—that's the best for me—as well as DefensePro.

We have deployed Alteon to our cluster to provide load balancing of the applications. We also utilize the security functionality, which is a WAF on top of the load balancing.

The solution has added a secure layer in front of the servers, protecting them from malicious actors, especially the actors who are targeting our application.

And the analytics have definitely helped save time, about 20 to 25 percent, when troubleshooting, due to the breadth of monitoring and the visibility that the solution offers.

The best features are the

• security through the web application firewall
• functionality that the solution offers, being a load balancer with the security functionality on top of it
• ease of administration.

The integrated application protection is very good.

Pretty much every feature is as promised.

I would like to see future enhancements in security, specifically in threat protection. That would definitely make it a 10 out of 10.

We've been using Radware Alteon for less than a year.

It's pretty stable.

It is scalable. We use it to protect our mail application, so Alteon is used by approximately 1,000 users.

The customer support is an area that can be enhanced, in terms of response time.

Neutral

We had a different solution before but not one specifically like Alteon. For load balancing we used different solutions from Citrix and Barracuda.

The integrated WAF in Alteon is much easier to administer as compared to the other solutions. That aspect is 50 percent better than those solutions.

The initial deployment was pretty straightforward. It took a few weeks and the fine-tuning, as per the customer's requirements, took one or two months.

We have it in one location but in multiple departments. Alteon is sitting in front of the server farm and the users in different departments are accessing these servers. Alteon acts as a security layer before the traffic gets passed to the actual servers.

Maintenance is required, of course, and we have two people involved in that process. But Alteon has helped to reduce our maintenance overhead by about 20 percent.

It's too early for us to see ROI. Still, we have absolutely seen time to value with Alteon. The moment the solution was implemented, we started observing the logs, which helped us fine-tune the policies. The visibility decreased the time to value helping us tweak the policies and get the boxes ready for production.

The solution is cost-efficient.

I would recommend Alteon and I would also recommend a proof of concept because every customer's environment is different. But it can definitely add value, considering the feature pack the solution provides with security and WAF, especially on top of the load balancing.

We are using Radware Alteon as a web application farm for all of our on-premise websites and as a reverse proxy.

The most valuable features of Radware Alteon are the reverse proxy functionality and the SSL offload and hardware.

Radware Alteon could improve the troubleshooting from the command line interface, they could do a better job making it easier.

I have been using Radware Alteon for approximately 10 years.

The stability of Radware Alteon is good.

Radware Alteon is scalable.

We have approximately 10,000 users using the solution globally. We have all of our applications for our web and EDI environment using the solution.

The technical support from Radware Alteon is wonderful.

I rate the support from Radware Alteon a five out of five.

Positive

The initial setup of Radware Alteon is straightforward. The full installation took approximately three to four days.

I rate the initial setup of Radware Alteon a four out of five.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house.

We have received a return on investment using Radware Alteon. It is one of their strong points. You receive the value of your money out of using it.

Radware Alteon is less expensive than many of the other competitors.

We compared Radware Alteon to other vendors, such as F5, and not only was Radware Alteon less expensive but it is more user-friendly in the interface and configuration.

We are going to change solutions. However, we are staying with Radware. The solution we are using is the hardware Radware Alteon 5208 but they make a virtual Alteon now. We are moving to all virtual Radware Alteons instead of physical hardware. The cost of us using all virtual Radware Alteon solutions will be $154,000 over three years. This includes 80 load balancers and 10 GB.

I rate Radware Alteon a nine out of ten.

We are a data center company, and we need load balancers at our end so that the load is balanced. These are network load balancers, and they are helping us to balance the overall traffic at our end. Because we are a data center company, we host a lot of customers. We host more than 800 customers in our data center, and that itself is a big use case. Earlier, we were using it only in one data center, but now, we are using it in two data centers, so we have two load balancers, one at each site, and we are about to configure global load balancing between both of them.

We are a data center company, and we used to see a lot of traffic management issues. Since the implementation of Alteon two and a half years ago, we have been able to load balance the entire traffic that is coming in. It gives our customers good performance. Customers are happy with the traffic management and the load balancing feature. The customers are more satisfied now than before it was implemented.

The integrated applicant protection is extremely good. Integration with third-party applications is easy in the case of Radware Alteon. This is a critical feature, and Radware has made it very simple.

We have also used the out-of-the-box integration feature, and we have also customized some integration with the help of our Radware partner. We have integrated with vRA/vRO. Ansible is going to be used along with my OpenStack in the new load balancer that we have attached.

The automation script libraries for each orchestrator are good. That is the reason the integration is simplified. If these automation scripts were complicated, integration would have been difficult, but because of these automation scripts, integration has become so easy, robust, and simple, and we are able to integrate third-party applications within a very short period of time.

The best part is that we are able to manage it easily. It is easy to manage and easy to integrate with third-party applications. It is also easy in terms of overall support. The installation itself was very easy. These are the most likable features about Radware load balancers.

Their support can be better. The Radware management is very proactive. We can connect to anybody in Radware Management in India. We can even connect with the MD of Radware India. However, their lower level staff should be more proactive towards the customers.

In terms of features, we have had issues with SSL in version 5208, and we asked them to improve it on the SSL front. They have improved the new one. Currently, we are using 6024. In this version, SSL integration and the integration layer are a lot more simplified and secure. This was missing in the earlier version, but in the new version, it is simplified and resolved. In the earlier version, firmware upgrades also used to take slightly more time, whereas, in the new version, there are no issues at all.

We have been using Radware Alteon for almost two and a half years.

It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten. It can be better.

Positive

We did not use anything before Alteon. We were without a load balancer when we started the operation. It was becoming very difficult to manage or load balance the traffic. Since we implemented it, life has become simple for us.

It is a hybrid model. In the first implementation, we did not face many issues. There were some traffic issues related to utilization, but they got resolved. We are now implementing the second one, and we are also going to implement global load balancing. Overall, things are much simpler now. They have improved its simplicity.

Its maintenance includes only firmware upgrades and nothing else. We do not see any maintenance issues.

We have a Radware partner. This partner is called RAH Infotech. They do the implementation along with our team. There were two people from the partner side and four of our team members. There were six people.

We did not receive training from Radware on how to use Alteon. It is also not required. It is very simple. We did not need any training. When our partner implemented it, we learned it along with that.

The return on investment is directly proportional to the improved satisfaction of the customer. Earlier, the customers were not satisfied, whereas now, customers are extremely satisfied because their traffic is balanced. They know that they are getting the best performance. The throughput is the best. When the customers are satisfied, the ROI of the system is already achieved.

We could see its value in two months from the date of purchase. It took almost three weeks to implement. After that, in two to three weeks, we started observing. We started seeing the value from eight weeks onwards.

It is the best in the industry. It was better than the competition, and that is what made us go ahead with them. In any product, we look for features and functionalities, product support, management connection, and pricing.

We looked at F5, Citrix, and Array solutions. We went for Alteon for four reasons. I have 30 years of experience, and at least for the last 15 years, a load balancer meant only Radware. We never heard about other products, so we were aware of Radware load balancers. This was the first reason. 

The second reason was the management connection. If you have a management connection at the topmost level, things become much easier, so the product is good, and the management connection is there. We have signed for the highest level of support from them.

Another important factor was the market buzzword. People believe that in the CISO platform category, Radware is among the best products in the market today.

The cost was another factor. We were able to get the best rate from them as compared to other competitors.

It is the best in the market. It is simple. It is not complex, and pricing is also very competitive, so you can go ahead with it.

Overall, I would rate Radware Alteon an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement.

Alteon is used in our environment for the application traffic from the customers. The traffic is coming from outside the network. It then comes to the firewall. From the firewall, it goes to the load balancer which sends the traffic to different application servers in a distributed environment.

There is no lack of connectivity. The traffic is going smoothly. The handshake is happening. SSL offloading is happening perfectly on the device, and it is going to the application server. The response is being sent to the customers within milliseconds. We have done a hardware refresh. Earlier, we were using the 6 GB memory box, and we are now using a 12 GB memory box with the same features.

The downtime is minimal. The product is robust, and there are no issues that we have faced. We are running N-1 releases or the latest releases. The support from Radware is fantastic.

The downtime is very little. We have not faced any issues. Because we are using it in a cluster environment, we have redundancy built in there, so we do not face any issues.

Alteon’s analytics have saved us time when troubleshooting. We understand the traffic coming from various customers and analyze it. It has saved about 15% to 20% of our time.

SSL offloading feature is one of the most important features. Traffic distribution is also done very well by Radware.

Radware should work on the vulnerabilities part. There are third-party security solutions that do the security vulnerability assessment (VA). The assessment part needs to be worked on and improved. There should be more solutions. If any issue comes up and if any vulnerability is reported, the Radware team should do an R&D on that and work on that. They should give the solution to the customer.

Everything else is perfect. We are not facing any issues with the product.

We have been using Alteon in our environment for almost seven to eight years. We have done a hardware refresh. Earlier, we were using the 5208 XL model, and now, we are using the 5208S model.

The stability of the box is a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. There is no problem. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

It is being used at multiple locations. About three to four people are working with Alteon, but for the application, we have a big team. Our customers are enterprises.

Their technical support from India is very good. However, when it is nighttime in India, it is a bit challenging because their support comes from outside India, most probably Israel. Sometimes, we face a challenge when the support is given by the team out of India. It takes time. Due to the language issues, it takes time for them to understand the issue, so the time to resolve the issue or work on an issue increases.

Positive

We were previously using the F5 load balancer, and then we switched to Alteon. Alteon is working fine for us, and we have not faced any issues with it.

We switched because of the features and pricing. Pricing plays the most important role in procurement. Alteon's pricing is competitive, and that is why we have moved on from F5 to Alteon. F5 is also not as flexible as Alteon.

It is an on-prem solution. Its deployment was straightforward. It was not complex.

We were able to migrate from old devices to new devices in minutes. We just copied the configuration from the old box and replicated it to the new box. It does not take much time. The releases and the patches that we deploy are also very efficient.

Replicating to a box took 20 to 30 minutes. Putting the operating system and replicating the configuration does not take more than 30 minutes.

It requires maintenance. When a new patch comes, we implement it. We plan a downtime and implement it. Even though we have a redundant node, we take downtime to be on the safer side. 

The solution has a minimum downtime, and the maintenance window is also short. It is not big.

We did not receive training from Radware on how to use Alteon. We are doing it by ourselves. It is an on-the-job kind of training.

Overall, two to three people were involved.

It is difficult to calculate the ROI because the Alteon load balancer is one part of the investment. There is the whole network and server infrastructure. We have not calculated the ROI, but it plays a very key role. The traffic is seamlessly distributed to the application servers. The application processes it and gives a response.

It is cost-efficient. That is why we have gone with Alteon. As a product, it is efficient and robust. We have not faced any issues with the device.

I would recommend Radware Alteon because it is a very smooth solution. Someone who wants to deploy an application load balancer in their environment can go for this box without any thoughts or concerns. The box is very scalable. It is a very smooth system. It handles the traffic very comfortably. You will not face any issues with the box.

Our application is an in-house application. It does not go over the Internet. We do not have any cloud connectivity. We also do not have out-of-the-box application integrations in our environment. Alteon is supporting the SNMPv3 standard for sending the SNMP trap to the outside box. That is the only integration we have done, and it is working fine. We have not integrated with OpenShift, Ansible, etc.

I would rate Radware Alteon a nine out of ten. There are only two areas of improvement. The vulnerability part needs improvement and the support given at night time from outside the country needs improvement. It takes longer to get an issue resolved with the support team located out of India.

My organization used the solution as a load balancer to balance the traffic on our application servers.

The GUI was a valuable feature. It was uncomplicated and easy to use.

The service could be improved by better customer support. 

They could also introduce much-needed cybersecurity as well as governance and tax reporting features.

I used the solution for almost four years.

The solution was stable.

The product is scalable. The functionality worked well. One issue was insufficient bandwidth to handle all the traffic, which likely impacted our timing. 

When we approached customer service and support with configuration-related issues and multiple cases of bugs in the Radware Alteon software, the response was slow, and there was no resolution. 

Neutral

I never used any other load balancer or ADC before. I've only worked with Radware Alteon.

From 2010 to 2018, when I was working, they had Alteon, which they implemented in 2000 when implementation was more complex.

I have no idea about the price, but the organization I was working for was always looking for economical products. So I would assume the price was quite competitive.

I would definitely recommend Radware load balancer to organizations around the globe that don't have a huge budget.

I would give the product an overall rating of seven out of 10.

We had an average of around 1,500 users. They used the product on everything and on every application server they had.

Regarding maintenance, we didn't have a very big IT environment. Two guys were enough to load the configuration and deal with operational issues.

Our maintenance included conflict backup, which differed depending on the organization. We scheduled load balancer reports as required, usually monthly, occasionally bi-monthly, and sometimes after six months, depending on customer requirements.

Potential users should use the application before implementing it and understand the infrastructure. They need to know how they will use the load balancer, what features it has to load, and whether they can utilize it.

We use Alteon to load balance our client traffic between different servers. We provide client support for deploying, configuring and troubleshooting. 

The best thing about Radware is the command line interface which is simple and very user-friendly. This is a very good device because it's easy to configure and easy to troubleshoot. Radware provides numerous guides including configuration, CLI, and troubleshooting. That is a very useful thing to troubleshoot, to configure our Radware devices. 

We've developed a lack of trust in the product because it sometimes behaves unexpectedly. Some issues are not resolved even after troubleshooting multiple times and then we have to reboot the device before it can be resolved. The solution could be more robust. The GUI should be improved because it's old and very traditional. One of our concerns is that Radware is not going to provide us with a free trial demo license so that we can install the product in our VM for our engineers to check, troubleshoot and study the product. 

I've been using this solution for over three years. 

Stability could be improved. 

Radware is a very scalable product. 

I haven't needed to contact technical support on my most recent project because I have a multiple-user configuration guide for the command line, the GUI base, and for any issues. The guides are very helpful. 

The initial setup and configuration process is very quick and easy. If we have a pre-configured setup file, then we can configure Radware within 5 to 10 minutes.

Radware is a very budget-friendly device. It is not too expensive.

This is a good product and we're generally satisfied with its features and capabilities. I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

We use Alteon Radware to balance web page services hosted on real and virtual servers, these government portals must be available 100% of the time and must be accessible from the internet and intranet. In addition to the fact that we can add an extra layer of security (due to the use of virtual IP address and proxy IP address) When there is an impact on any of the servers, we receive an alert notification and we can attend to the impact on that server, for the end-user, this is indistinct since the service is not affected.

We have improved the user experience by having services available all the time, in addition to the fact that with this solution it is easier to manage from a graphical interface that is useful and intuitive, as an administrator it is important to have a clear and complete vision of the services that we operate. Simple troubleshooting tools have helped us solve problems faster and problems are more complex so analysis is complex so we asked for Radware support. This has helped us to identify exactly where the problems are in the network, correct faults, and continuous improvement.

The simple and well-documented configuration allows us to be able to implement new balancing services at the request of the user with the same conditions and good service that they expect. We can also make changes to services that are already running, as I mentioned before, the graphical interface is very intuitive and you can almost always make the most common changes quickly.

Radware has been characterized by being extremely robust. This gives us the confidence to offer our users a continuous service.

We recently had a problem with the table's Obsolete ARP which was observed by the support team. It would be good to diagnose and solve this problem with a patch since it is not documented that it will be solved in later updates. The implementation of this service has been expanding to more of our clients, it is rare that we need to contact Radware support and even more rarely a call in real-time but we have found few technicians who give us support in Spanish, we could attend to the problems much faster if language barriers weren't an issue.

I used the solution two years ago.

The solution is extremely robust.

It is highly scalable.

99% of the time they have given us fast and efficient support.

Positive

Manual balancing tools and changes were made as a user might experience outages.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is well documented and we are free to do it via GUI or CLI.

We implemented this through an internal team, which is trained to do so thanks to the training tools provided by Radware.

We can offer automation in case of impact, which translates into time savings. I do not have the exact information of the ROI in terms of cash

The licensing processes are easy and the costs are acceptable. We use permanent licenses and we have not had any problems.

We did not evaluate other options. 

They could improve the solution update processes to make it easier and faster.