White Paper A10 Thunder and AX Series Application Delivery Controllers and the A10 Advantage

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1 White Paper A10 Thunder and AX Series Application Delivery Controllers and the A10 Advantage June 2013 WP_ADC

2 Disclaimer This document does not create any express or implied warranty about A10 Networks or about its products or services, including but not limited to fitness for a particular use and non-infringement. A10 Networks has made reasonable efforts to verify that the information contained herein is accurate, but A10 Networks assumes no responsibility for its use. All information is provided "as-is." The product specifications and features described in this publication are based on the latest information available; however, specifications are subject to change without notice, and certain features may not be available upon initial product release. Contact A10 Networks for current information regarding its products or services. A10 Networks products and services are subject to A10 Networks standard terms and conditions. Copyright 2013 A10 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. A10 Networks, A10 Thunder, vthunder, ACOS, acloud, aflex, axapi, avcs, Virtual Chassis, SoftAX, and aflow are trademarks or registered trademarks of A10 Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. 2

3 A10 Application Delivery Controllers: Load Balancing Evolution Today s web servers host complex applications that require intelligence at every layer. If an application is slow or unavailable, or an Internet connection or server goes down, business productivity and profits are lost. A10 s flexible Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) give customers full control of their web, and any application environment, enabling scalability and availability for all mission-critical applications. An ADC is the evolution of the traditional Server Load Balancer (SLB). In addition to spreading the load of client requests among many servers, the goal of an ADC is to accelerate, optimize, secure and scale application traffic. Figure 1: Typical ADC Placement A10 Thunder and AX Series ADCs provide the flexibility to solve critical business challenges. With unrivaled performance, A10 s ADCs enable businesses to scale with intelligent application networking while reducing operational expense and complexity. 3

4 ACOS Delivers A10 s ADC Advantage A10 is a proven innovator in application networking. Leadingedge, industry-hardened software and hardware combined with worldclass support and service help customers reduce operational costs, increase application efficiency and enhance the enduser experience. A10 s Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) is the foundation for the technological success of the A10 Thunder and AX Series. Seasoned by over 7 years of customer-driven development, ACOS delivers a unique 64-bit symmetric multi-core shared memory architecture. The ACOS advantage is the reason A10 s products can get maximum leverage from the CPUs and memory, resulting in a platform that is extremely energy efficient while providing the highest possible performance for improving data center efficiency and reducing cost. Because of ACOS, A10 s ADCs scale beyond systems with 4x the hardware. 4

5 The chart above shows survey users who had previously used F5, Citrix and Cisco and improved performance by replacing these solutions with A10 s AX Series. A10 s Advanced ADC Features A10 Thunder and AX Series provide an essential layer of intelligence to application networking. This includes application performance for uninterrupted and scalable commerce, as well as data center efficiency for reduced operational cost. Some advanced, frequently used A10 ADC features include: Compression Caching TCP Connection multiplexing Application layer security SSL offload Multi-tenancy Global redundancy Application traffic control REST-style XML API management 5

6 Customer benefits include the ability to deploy differentiated customer services, reduce costs through data center consolidation, increase efficiency with large traffic volumes, and accelerate web speed to drive customer satisfaction. Security Efficient and secure network traffic flow is vital to an organization s fiscal health. For many organizations, Internet connectivity is an integral part of the core business. If the network is compromised, the results are often disastrous; leading to downtime, loss of revenue and loss of reputation. Key ADC technologies to enhance application security include: DDoS Protection Web Application Firewall DNS Application Firewall SSL Intercept Application Access Management (pre-authentication) IPv6 Migration and IPv4 Preservation With IPv6 as the designated successor to IPv4, enterprises and service providers are implementing products and solutions to enable a smooth transition from IPv4 to IPv6. To facilitate a smooth transition to IPv6, while still ensuring forward and backward compatibility with legacy IPv4 systems, a highly scalable IPv4/IPv6 gateway is required. The gateway should support the various IPv4- to-ipv6 techniques in use today, each of which addresses a different business need, and should be flexible enough to accommodate future techniques. A10 Networks ADC solutions provide the industry s most scalable IPv4/IPv6 gateway to ensure a smooth transition. The first step in addressing the IP address shortage can be to use Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) 1 to preserve the current IPv4 addresses. The A10 Thunder and AX Series include the most comprehensive set of IPv6 migration features of any ADC on the market. With A10, customers can run IPv4 and IPv6 features simultaneously through a scalable, high-performance platform designed to address current transition requirements and future growth needs. Organizations may start with IPv4 preservation with CGN and then enable IPv6 access or true IPv6 migration technologies as required. A10 s ADC platforms meet the intense hardware requirements for maintaining many sessions and large translation tables, while also providing the most comprehensive feature set currently available. 1 Also sometimes spelled as CGNAT. Another name for the feature is Large Scale NAT (LSN). 6

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8 All-inclusive Licensing Over 2500 customers, including enterprises, Web Giants and Service Providers, have chosen the A10 platform for advanced features, speed and simplified licensing. A10 s all-inclusive licensing model provides tremendous value for customers. When features and performance levels are licensed separately, not only the budget is at risk. Licensing bandwidth, for example, poses great operational challenges. When an organization s application is increasing in popularity, either over time, or because of a sudden spike in interest after a marketing campaign, bandwidth license limits can seriously reduce the application s performance. When a bandwidth license s limits are met, this is not immediately clear to the server administration team and the network team. During this time, the end-user experience is limited and the application s reputation is impacted. A10 platforms spare organizations from operational failures and complexity caused by licensing. Advanced Hardware To ensure the highest levels of performance and reliability, A10 uses leading edge hardware components. In the A10 Thunder Series, no moving parts are used in the inaccessible part of the appliance. Traditional hard disk drives use spinning media, and are prone to failure. Instead, A10 uses solid state drives (SSDs), which provide much better performance, and as there are no moving parts, SSDs are infinitely more reliable than spinning media. Likewise, the CPUs and ASICs are not equipped with attached cooling fans. The only moving parts in the Thunder appliance are the fans belonging to the redundant power supplies, and the smart fans. These items are hot swappable, so they can be replaced without requiring downtime. The Flexible Traffic ASICs (FTAs) provide hardware-based flow acceleration, while the Switching and Routing ASICs provide hardware acceleration for key networking functions. 8

9 Select models are equipped with high-performance, multi-chip SSL acceleration cards that are exceptionally well suited for environments with growing SSL needs. SSL traffic is becoming more ubiquitous and server hardware has trouble keeping up with the increased SSL key sizes that are now standard. The new SSL acceleration hardware for A10 Thunder and AX Series provides near-parity performance for the upgrade to 2048-bit key lengths, and has the extreme power needed to handle 4096-bit keys at high-quality production levels. Support and Service A10 Networks and its partners worldwide are committed to complete customer satisfaction. Customers are extremely pleased with the level of care that our support organization provides. A10 provides a variety of support services designed to ensure that A10 s solutions install quickly, configure easily, and operate reliably in your network. Consolidate and Scale Through Performance and Innovation A10 has earned a wide base of satisfied customers in the short decade since the company s inception, with consistent revenue growth. The ability to quickly meet new application networking challenges as they emerge, while providing unparalleled support, helps A10 maintain its leadership in the industry. A10 has consistently delivered new meaningful features 3-36 months before other vendors; examples include CGN, SSL Intercept, DNS Application Firewall, NITROX III SSL, 64-bit operating systems and appliances, and the most scalable appliances on the market today. With the extreme performance that A10 Thunder models deliver, and the innovative, all-inclusive features of ACOS, the Thunder Series provide an excellent platform to consolidate multiple point products such as a WAF, DNS Application Firewall, and dedicated SLBs into one appliance. This is realized through the use of Application Delivery Partitions, which enable a customer to partition out select solutions for different end-users, or select parts of the network. A10 provides customers a choice to get the best performance, and the widest choice of features, in a highly efficient platform. A10 Thunder and AX Series enable organizations to save energy, data center footprint, and cost. 9

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