A10 Networks Thunder ADC Reviews

My main use case for A10 Networks Thunder ADC is web application load balancing. If I have multiple web servers hosting the same application, I perform load balancing. I do SSL offloading for HTTPS encryption, which can be CPU-intensive. I use it for high availability, global server load balancing, DDoS protection, API gateway, microservices, Kubernetes Ingress, telecom 5G networks, active-active data center design, multi-cloud traffic steering, and similar applications.

I use load balancing extensively with A10 Networks Thunder ADC. For example, with A10 Networks Thunder ADC load balancing, the requests are distributed. If a server fails, the health check detects the failure. There are different kinds of load balancing, including round-robin, least connections, and weighted load balancing. There is also layer four versus layer seven load balancing. In a real enterprise example, such as a banking application, the customers might go to A10 Networks Thunder ADC and then be directed to a login application, payment application, or API application. A10 Networks Thunder ADC responsibilities include SSL termination, session persistence, DDoS filtering, health monitoring, and traffic routing.

Mostly, I use A10 Networks Thunder ADC with load balancing and also in a data center. I need an active-active data center design and also use it for security for DDoS protection.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC offers many features. A few are advanced load balancing, which we already discussed. It does layer four and layer seven load balancing. It has extremely high performance. It can do SSL/TLS offloading. It has integrated security features including DDoS protection, web application firewall, DNS firewall, and single sign-on. It can do global server load balancing, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support, strong automation and DevOps integration, telecom carrier-grade scalability, and multi-tenancy.

The advanced load balancing plus SSL offloading in A10 Networks Thunder ADC directly improves application uptime, speed, scalability, server efficiency, and user experience. I think intelligent load balancing and SSL/TLS offloading for high performance per appliance and built-in security are the best features.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC has impacted my organization positively in many ways. I have worked at many types of companies. Previously, I worked for telecom providers as an ISP. A10 Networks Thunder ADC provided positive impact by handling massive traffic volumes, carrier-grade scalability, DNS optimization, DDoS protection, and reduced latency. I have also worked for a financial institution, which needed high availability, secure transactions, and low downtime. A10 Networks Thunder ADC provided positive impact through SSL acceleration speed, application protection, fast failover, and secure customer sessions.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is quite solid, but there are some issues that I face, particularly with the user interface. A current issue is that the GUI is less polished than competitors. When compared against F5 BIG-IP or Citrix ADC, the GUI is not as good. The documentation and learning curve are areas that can be improved by A10 Networks. Compared with larger vendors including F5, Cisco, or Palo Alto, A10 has a smaller ecosystem. Although A10 Networks Thunder ADC supports cloud and Kubernetes, many enterprises now expect deeper cloud-native functionality. Improvement areas include Kubernetes Ingress maturity, service mesh integration, and auto-scaling intelligence.

I have worked with A10 Networks Thunder ADC for approximately five years.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is very stable in my experience.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is very scalable.

Customer support for A10 Networks Thunder ADC was good, but it can be improved, as it was not the best.

I can share many specific outcomes and metrics after implementing A10 Networks Thunder ADC. It improved uptime and availability. Before A10 Networks Thunder ADC, a single-server failure meant an outage, but now traffic is automatically redirected to healthy servers. There are also server cost savings because the organization now needs fewer back-end servers and has lower CPU utilization. It has faster application performance and reduced downtime costs.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is a great, economical product if you want a smaller ecosystem. I would advise starting with a clear business goal and deploying high availability from day one. Since it can do SSL offloading, I recommend prioritizing SSL offloading and designing health checks carefully. Automation is key, so automate early, keep the configuration simple initially, and plan the capacity properly. Monitor everything and train the operations team. Test failover regularly, use role separation, evaluate your cloud strategy early, focus on operational simplicity, and measure return on investment continuously. My rating for this product is three out of five.

My main use case for A10 Networks Thunder ADC is to ensure application delivery, security, and high availability.

One specific example of how I use A10 Networks Thunder ADC for application delivery and security in my environment is by using it for load balancing a public e-commerce website. A10 Networks Thunder ADC helps with load balancing on my public e-commerce site by ensuring this is critical for maintaining uptime and handling traffic spikes without impacting the customer experience.

I have another important use case for A10 Networks Thunder ADC, which is carrier-grade NAT or CGNAT. I use CGNAT with A10 Networks Thunder ADC for protection from DDoS attacks.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC offers several strong features that make it a very competitive solution. First, they provide advanced Layer 4 or Layer 7 load balancing. Another key feature is SSL offloading and encryption handling. A10 Networks Thunder ADC is also highly scalable and flexible.

Scalability for A10 Networks Thunder ADC shows up in my day-to-day operations during high-traffic events such as Black Friday. One feature I find really powerful and something underrated about A10 Networks Thunder ADC is A-Flex.

Beyond the standard ADC feature, what really stands out to me about A10 Networks Thunder ADC is how customizable, performant, and automated the platform is. A10 Networks Thunder ADC has a significant impact on my organization in several ways. First, it improves application availability and performance. From a security perspective, it helps protect applications against threats such as DDoS attacks. It also has a strong operational impact. In terms of cost, it can lower both CapEx and OpEx.

I chose a rating of eight or nine instead of a perfect ten because there are a few areas that could be improved for A10 Networks Thunder ADC. First, a stronger ecosystem and wider market adoption would definitely help. Second, enhanced integration with third-party tools would be beneficial. The improvements needed are not about fixing major issues, but more about enhancing usability, ecosystem, and integration.

I have been working in my current field for five years.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is stable.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC's scalability is impressive.

I am not certain about the customer support, but I believe Broadcom handles it.

Before A10 Networks Thunder ADC, we used F5.

I have not seen a return on investment with A10 Networks Thunder ADC, as that is not for me but for another department.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for A10 Networks Thunder ADC is a question for another department, not for me.

Before choosing A10 Networks Thunder ADC, I evaluated other options including F5, NetScaler, Cloudflare, Kemp, NGINX, and other solutions.

The most important advice for others looking into using A10 Networks Thunder ADC is to clearly understand your use case and requirements upfront. I would recommend that you clearly understand your use case and requirements before implementing A10 Networks Thunder ADC. I have given this solution a rating of eight.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is typically used for Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) related use cases.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC's caching and compression features are very helpful in reducing latency.

I would assess A10 Networks Thunder ADC's load balancing for improving application reliability during peak periods at around 9 out of 10, as GSLB is far better, and we are very satisfied with it. Load balancing also fulfills our requirements.

In future updates, I would like to see better speed in the features of A10 Networks Thunder ADC.

I have been using A10 Networks Thunder ADC for around five to six years.

In some of our deployments of A10 Networks Thunder ADC, we have employed DDoS and other security features, and for the past few years, we haven't experienced any major incidents, although there were minor incidents related to some airline and other customer DDoS attacks that A10 couldn't mitigate.

There are no complexities with the deployment of A10 Networks Thunder ADC feature-wise; it's entirely acceptable. However, when it comes to customer requirements, sometimes it's difficult to manage some requirements because they expect features that require another product, leading to some challenges. Other than that, the product is fine, so we can easily manage everything.

The support we receive from the team is quite excellent, and nothing directly comes to mind regarding improvements for A10 Networks Thunder ADC at the moment.

Normally, deployment of A10 Networks Thunder ADC takes around two to three days based on the customer requirement, and sometimes it is extended for one week.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC was purchased through AWS Marketplace.

I do not directly involve myself in the deployment due to my job role, but I manage and handle the team that is directly involved. When there is an issue, then I am also involved.

Normally, there are two people in each deployment, one being the main engineer who is handling the deployment, so we prioritize having two engineers per deployment as much as possible.

We do see a return on investment and cost reductions after the implementation of A10 Networks Thunder ADC, as I mentioned earlier regarding an incident related to one airline company.

I estimate that I can save around 20 to 30 percent of my budget with A10 Networks Thunder ADC, though it's not an exact figure.

We are working with some other vendors, not only A10 Networks.

Currently, we are working with tools such as F5 from other vendors.

I have experience with AWS, and I also have experience with both AWS and Azure, and sometimes GCP as well.

We utilize multi-cloud support with A10 Networks Thunder ADC.

We have customers utilizing A10 Networks Thunder ADC in the public cloud as well.

I didn't technically involve myself with analytics in A10 Networks Thunder ADC because I haven't been involved in that part in the past few years. According to my team, the analytics tools are quite prominent, so there are no issues there.

We have a distributorship with A10 Networks and are considered a partner.

I would rate this review 9 out of 10.

I primarily use A10 Networks Thunder ADC for load balancing and application delivery across my production environments, sitting in front of my critical web and API services that help solve problems by distributing traffic efficiently and maintaining uptime during peak loads. A significant part of the use case is ensuring high availability and minimizing downtime during maintenance or unexpected spikes whenever there is more traffic or a network issue. One of the main cases is also a combination of application delivery and basic security handling, using A10 Networks Thunder ADC to manage traffic across multiple application servers while leveraging features such as DDoS protection and SSL offloading. Whenever major traffic occurs, I use this to run it efficiently in a hybrid environment where some workloads are on-premises and others are in the cloud.

I use A10 Networks Thunder ADC mainly in front of my e-commerce platform that I have built for a client, and during seasonal sales, I saw traffic spikes at around three to four times the normal load that I was receiving on that site. A10 Networks Thunder ADC distributes the traffic across multiple backend servers and handles SSL offloading, which keeps response times stable, and without it, my app servers would have become overwhelmed very quickly.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC fits quite seamlessly into my overall workflow, and once it is set up, it became more of a set-it-and-monitor-it, autopilot mode component rather than something I constantly have to tweak. Most of my interaction is around policy updates or scaling decisions rather than day-to-day firefighting and working hard, shifting me to working smartly rather than hard.

The standout features in A10 Networks Thunder ADC are definitely its load balancing capability and SSL offloading because these are very crucial and primary features that I seek from any service. The traffic distribution is quite reliable even under heavier loads, and SSL offloading has helped reduce the burden on my backend server, especially when I saw three to four times higher traffic than usual during sales. I also appreciate the flexibility in configuring policies, giving good control without being overly complicated. A10 Networks Thunder ADC handles high traffic volumes very efficiently, showing consistent response times even during the spikes I mentioned. SSL offloading is one of the key features that I was seeking, significantly improving my backend performance. Overall, all these features feel optimized for speed and stability because, in the end, I also want my client to have the best experience.

After enabling SSL offloading, the most noticeable change was reduced CPU utilization on my backend servers because that was taking much more load and cost at my backend and my working capital. Reduced CPU utilization on my backend servers was a game-changer, as a good portion of resources was going into handling encryption and decryption before I shifted that load to A10 Networks Thunder ADC. I saw roughly around a fifteen to thirty percent drop in CPU usage during peak hours, translating into better response times and more headroom for handling additional traffic and more clients, becoming very cost-efficient for me as a company.

The CPU usage and response times have definitely impacted my organization positively, with A10 Networks Thunder ADC handling SSL offloading and providing my backend systems with more headroom. From an end-user perspective, the improvements translate into faster and more consistent response times, and that reliability has been a clear positive for me, especially during high traffic times that I mentioned multiple times. I definitely received fewer complaints, and the differences are huge. After implementing SSL offloading on A10 Networks Thunder ADC, performance became more consistent, especially during peak traffic. I saw fewer complaints around slow response times, and overall, the experience felt smoother from the client side.

One area where A10 Networks Thunder ADC could improve is the user interface, which is functional but not the most intuitive, especially for new users, making it a bit under-utilized. Some workflows take a bit of time to get used to, and simplifying the UI would make onboarding much easier.

I want to add that around documentation, the core capabilities of A10 Networks Thunder ADC are strong, and having more structured, real-world configuration examples would make a big difference, especially for teams that are new to the platform, helping reduce the initial learning curve for them.

I have been using A10 Networks Thunder ADC for the last three years.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is sometimes stable in my experience, but I am not certain about this assessment. It is not really bad and not a major downtime issue. Most of the time, it just runs in the background without issues.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC can handle growth easily, and I have scaled up during higher traffic periods.

Before choosing A10 Networks Thunder ADC, I do not know if the organization evaluated other options, but I assume they were discussing Citrix ADC.

I would advise others looking into using A10 Networks Thunder ADC to integrate it nicely, as it is a powerful solution, and you will get the most value when your architecture, traffic flows, and policies are clearly defined upfront. Also, take time to understand its advanced features gradually rather than trying to use everything at once, getting into it slowly. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is primarily used in our environment for application delivery and traffic management of enterprise applications. We use it mainly for load balancing, improving application availability, SSL offloading, and ensuring reliable traffic distribution across back-end services.

We have onboarded enterprise applications using A10 Networks Thunder ADC primarily for load balancing and improving application stability and availability. We use the ADC product for SSL offloading and renewing SSL certificates, ensuring centralized SSL certificates so that we do not miss any SSL certificate expiration.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC offers HA failover, security integration, operational stability, and ease of deployment and management.

In the past, we had an issue with SSL when the concerned team missed SSL expiration emails, which caused the application to go down for approximately eight hours. While using A10 Networks Thunder ADC, the different team managing the product reminds everyone about SSL renewal. Once we have SSL offloading, this application helps us to renew the SSL immediately without the burden of requesting a CSR, generating the CSR, and managing everything involved in that process.

There are other tools in the market, but A10 Networks Thunder ADC works quite stably. This application is remarkably stable and saves significant time.

I believe the user experience and user interface could be improved considerably.

The UI is complicated, making navigation through the product more challenging than competitor products like F5, which I would rate slightly better than A10 Networks Thunder ADC.

Overall, the application is quite stable, but there could be many more improvements and suggestions for it. There are no further improvements I can mention at this time.

I have been using A10 Networks Thunder ADC for close to two to four years.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is quite stable, and there are no outages.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is quite stable in terms of scalability.

I have not had the opportunity to interact with customer support.

I have worked with F5, but I did not switch. It was a client requirement where I was working with F5, but with my current client, I am working with A10 Networks Thunder ADC.

I did not evaluate other options as A10 Networks Thunder ADC was already deployed.

There are many other instances, but I would stick to this one. A10 Networks Thunder ADC is deployed in a hybrid cloud environment where we have an on-premise data center and also use AWS, GCP, and Azure. We primarily use A10 Networks Thunder ADC with AWS. I would rate A10 Networks Thunder ADC an eight out of ten.

According to my understanding, the licensing model and the application availability time in A10 Networks Thunder ADC provide a good solution for all operation-critical customers, and they might find the high availability feature very useful.

Application load balancing in A10 Networks Thunder ADC plays a crucial role in improving application reliability during peak periods.

I believe that A10 Networks Thunder ADC utilizes technology with one of the protocols in its load balancing solutions, and I think it's a great solution that I found in the market. I conducted research and clearly see their licensing model and the technical methodology to connect and maintain high availability, which I think are the major features highlighted in the solution.

DDoS protection is one kind of extra feature in A10 Networks Thunder ADC solution, but I see that in the inbuilt solution, the data classification part is pending there, creating a gap between the DDoS and the data classification parts. I think that is the main improvement that should be addressed in the next couple of years.

In the Sri Lankan market, we mainly expect a budget-friendly option for physical appliances from A10 Networks Thunder ADC, particularly in the 3GB to 6GB range, while they are currently releasing a hardware appliance for 10G bandwidth throughput. I think that should be improved much better.

Recently, government taxes have increased A10 Networks Thunder ADC prices according to their taxing policies. For the moment, I think we can go with a competitive price, even though sometimes we face a similar price to our competitive products. If that can be adjusted, that would be better.

In the vThunder series of A10 Networks Thunder ADC, they have a perpetual license model and a subscription model, but in the Thunder series, the physical appliance does not have a perpetual license model, mainly operating on the subscription model. I think adding that feature could expand the market. Specifically, I want to highlight that a low number of throughput can be released to at least the APAC region, which will be very useful. At the perimeter level, we don't have access to implement the virtual appliance model and must use a hardware box. Compared to the current release version, we cannot match their budget with a good price, so that is my primary expectation. If there is any chance to launch a box with 3 to 6 throughput, I think that would be better, as we could easily switch to our BFSI and enterprise customers, who have a big pain point in their firewall load balancing. However, the challenge remains that we cannot deploy a virtual appliance there and must go with a physical appliance, so making that adjustment would create a good opportunity to expand the market.

I can give A10 Networks Thunder ADC a rating of 10 out of 10. Their tech support is very responsible, and their response time is very low, providing superb support.

Positive

Before A10 Networks Thunder ADC, I handled the WAF solution. I joined as a product manager for the WAF solution, and I previously worked for the SI industry in Sri Lanka, where I highlighted that WAF is the main requirement for the Sri Lankan market infrastructure.

I didn't have a chance to capture those areas regarding A10 Networks Thunder ADC caching and compression features. The previously mentioned areas are covered from my requirement gathering and customer meetups.

As per my experience, the vThunder series of A10 Networks Thunder ADC is very easy to deploy, and the cost is also very reliable and justifiable. On the physical appliance side, they have added WAF and all, resulting in a higher cost while ensuring reliability. They guarantee 10-16 years online for that physical appliance, which is very beneficial for the Telco and BFSI side.

For the moment, I haven't had any kind of scenario with A10 Networks Thunder ADC multi-cloud support.

I didn't have a chance to explore A10 Networks Thunder ADC analytics tools.

I can give A10 Networks Thunder ADC an overall rating of nine out of ten as a product.

We use the solution for ProTechVIP, the software, the client, the servers, and the firewalls. We mix them, protecting the connection and the servers from direct access.

We can control access based on the specific application. If other devices are attempting to directly access the servers, you can block them. Additionally, you can balance the load among servers to optimize performance. For example, utilizing caching can make the application run faster.

It's very simple to use.

The product is expensive. 

I have been using A10 Networks Thunder ADC as a partner for over two years.

The solution’s stability is very good.

The solution’s scalability is good. We also sell directly to the government, sometimes more than 20 boxes.

If you need more specific guys, it takes time, or you can get support from them. After sending many emails, Thunder calls directly to talk, and then we can talk.

Neutral

The initial setup is very simple. The issue is that it achieves high output across all its features, specifically the output ports. This affects the customer's solution because sometimes, the customer is even aware of the user's activity on certain servers. If you have all the necessary information, we can quickly deploy the solution within two to three days.

The size of the Thunder ADC depends on its configuration. For example, the cache converter typically includes more than two rack units, often requiring at least three rack units for adequate space.

I rate it a ten out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

ROI is very good because it optimizes the process.

I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. However, When you use KPS, I rate it five because it's very expensive.

A10 Networks' Thunder ADC is being sold by adding hardware (HxD) and configuring certain aspects like the Exponent. These modified versions are sold directly to customers. They are using HPANETX Thunder models, some of which originate from JTerrin. I believe these models come from Microsoft, which has a significant data analytics contract. Here in Brazil, UsersBox is being utilized, and there is an issue when I try to sell a new box from ATEM. My box is five times more expensive than the other one. I sent the box's serial number to GuidePhone A10 for verification, and it turns out that the box is from Microsoft Japan. Despite the conference being for Microsoft Japan, these boxes somehow ended up here in Brazil.

The solution requires less maintenance.

The A10 Networks Thunder ADC can be more expensive than alternatives offering similar performance. Another issue is its architecture: when using our software architecture, there are limitations when creating new instances, such as a new VS. Typically, with solutions like F5, you need to define and allocate resources upfront when creating a new instance. If you need more resources allocated to a Virtual Service, you must often delete and recreate it. In contrast, A10 Networks allows for more flexible resource allocation adjustments without needing to recreate the instance.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for load balancing purposes.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is an easy-to-use and flexible solution.

The solution should add automation features in the next release.

I have been using A10 Networks Thunder ADC for five to seven years.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is a stable solution.

Less than ten people are using the solution in our organization.

The feedback from the solution's technical support was satisfactory.

The solution’s initial setup was easy.

Our organization did an infrastructure refresh some years ago from Cisco to A10 Networks Thunder ADC. The migration was quite easy from Cisco to A10 Networks Thunder ADC.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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.