Radware Alteon Reviews

We are a system integrator company in the Philippines, and we are selling Radware Alteon product. Radware Alteon is usually used for a load balancer, so either a server load balancer or a link load balancer, and we can use Radware Alteon for both kinds of setup.

The best feature of Radware Alteon is basically the configuration; how we configure it is very straightforward, and it is very simple to configure. It also has a lot of features, such as the Web Application Firewall features, and it also has optimization features, so those are the features in which Radware Alteon excels over other competitors.

I have actually utilized Radware Alteon's SSL offloading feature with some of our other deployments. With the SSL encryption and decryption, Radware Alteon can decrypt and encrypt SSL faster, and it is actually the one feature that Radware Alteon excels in.

Radware Alteon's application performance monitoring helps customers to pinpoint the pain points within their network infrastructure because it can actually determine the problem between the user up to the server or the application.

Radware Alteon's content distribution capability helps improve global application access because this optimization feature helps to distribute content to all of the servers.

Radware Alteon is very beneficial to the organization once we have it, either as a server load balancer or a link load balancer.

I don't think of features that will make Radware Alteon better because it is already better, but to be able to compete also with other competitors, the price is something to consider. It is not actually that expensive, but for their level, there are other load balancers with the same feature, but they have a lower price, so pricing is the only point I can give.

In the future, I would like to see some other security features added, such as DDoS, which is Distributed Denial of Service. Currently, it has the Web Application Firewall feature, but in the future, they can also add a DDoS feature or a more in-depth DDoS feature.

I have been working and implementing Radware Alteon for around 15 years.

There are no difficulties with the deployment of Radware Alteon; it is quite straightforward. There are no complexities.

One person can do it without any trouble. Within a couple of hours, if the deployment is very straightforward and if the requirements or the IP addresses are already in place, the deployment can be completed.

In terms of Radware technical support, they are very helpful, so if I ever need assistance from them, they respond immediately.

Positive

I have not worked with any other vendors or competitors of Radware so far.

In terms of time, the deployment requires a couple of hours if it is the straightforward setup.

I have a dedicated team who does deployment in our customers' environment. We have ten people in our technical team, which consists of ten engineers.

We use the product for our web services across multiple web farms. It manages SSL load balancing and SSL offload, meaning SSL management is handled at the load balancing level. Additionally, we use it for SSL renewal and management, which simplifies the process rather than managing each individual server or farm.

The most valuable feature is the support from the engineering team. They quickly resolved a VLAN issue that other vendors could not. The product allows us to manage multiple networks and VLANs into a single box and add numerous web services and farms efficiently. The SSL management and integration capabilities are also standout features.

I would like to see more educational and training sessions. Other OEMs offer free courses and hands-on labs on new technologies and features, which we find useful. The WAF solution requires more training. 

Additional educational components like videos would be beneficial.

I have been using it since 2016.

The solution is 100% stable. We've never faced downtime, even during peak transaction hours. It manages SSL offloading and compressions efficiently, without over-utilization.

The solution is highly scalable. It handles peak loads and thousands of concurrent connections without exceeding 10% utilization. It's robust and ensures efficient compression.

The customer service and support are excellent. I would rate them ten out of ten. We never face support issues, and their team resolves any critical issues quickly once they are involved.

Positive

We previously used F5 and Array solutions. However, we switched to Radware based on market research, Gartner reports, and cost-effectiveness. Radware offered optimal performance at a better price point.

The initial setup took approximately fifteen days. We conducted POCs, unit testing, and created farms for UAT testing before going live. Radware personnel were on-site, which facilitated face-to-face communication and training during deployment.

The deployment involved two people from our side and one from Radware, making it a three-person team.

The product offers great return on investment. Since 2016, we have already gone through a lifecycle and are procuring another product, suggesting that our investments are well justified.

The cost of the Radware solution is reasonable and stable. I don't have detailed pricing information, but it is considered optimal for the performance provided.

We evaluated F5 and Array before opting for Radware.

I recommend having support directly from Radware, not through SI channels, as they handle multiple OEMs and might lack in-depth knowledge about each. Additionally, having available knowledge bases or resources for troubleshooting would be beneficial. 

I would rate the overall solution ten out of ten.

Its use case involves protecting our external services in the business.

It is a necessity because of the different security standards that our company has to comply with.

Our services are protected, and I have not seen any breaches that would impact our systems. The systems are stable, and I can very clearly see all of the malicious actors outside trying to access our systems.

It helps with troubleshooting immensely because the solution protects not only from threat actors outside of our business but also from internal actors or partner clients accessing our systems. Those requests are also validated inside Radware Alteon. I can see client partners or users accessing some systems in the wrong way or any misconfiguration inside our systems. Radware Alteon prevents our systems from breaking down because of those wrong requests. It has saved at least 40% to 50% time.

The integrated application protection on the other side of the load balancer is great. There is the caveat that it is not easily pre-configurable on that side, but everything after that is easy. When the services are up and running, the feedback, the insight, and the forensics of the happenings inside are very easy to understand and work with. The system automatically suggests what needs to be configured and what can be mitigated or refined in configuration. All of those are making my day easier.

Its implementation time took about half a year, and it took us about a year and a half to realize its benefits.

I find the best features to be the flexibility and ease of use. The configuration is very straightforward. 

In my experience, Alteon is very dynamic software. They keep integrating new features that sometimes break our production, but we use clustered systems, so we can test those software releases. However, sometimes they take a while to reach us. We have had to work with Radware to remedy issues on their side that they have verified. On the other hand, they have been very proactive in remedying those problems. We have solved some critical issues within a month, but the release verification channel requires some updates. 

The support channel is also an issue. Moving through tiered support can be challenging at times. Even when I go through the authenticated portal where I have registered my devices with their serial numbers and all known details, they ask to verify the specified device. I have already included that in the ticket support system.

I have been using Alteon since around 2018. It has probably been five years.

We have experienced some issues. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is hard to tell, but I have had some performance issues. I cannot say whether they were because of Radware. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have a hybrid environment. It is very spread out. In terms of its users, we have tiered access. We have solution appliance administrators, and then there are users who monitor their services inside the clients. So, we have a couple of administrators and the rest are application admins. Overall, we have less than ten people.

In general, I would rate their support a nine out of ten because the first level of support sometimes requires re-verification. We have to escalate a bit to have some momentum. However, local third-party support is reachable for us at any moment. There is a dedicated expert answering even the toughest questions. If needed, he re-routes us to the Radware support, and he takes care of the support communication for us.

Positive

In the current scope of systems, I have not used any other solution. I have used different systems in different projects but not in this context.

The setup is local, not cloud-based. The deployment time to fully implement was half a year. 

In terms of implementation strategy, we are very step-based when it comes to infrastructure. We evaluate and point out our needs. We rely heavily on third-party support. Radware is not directly supporting us in Latvia. We have third-party support locally, and they help us very much in this regard. 

Radware provides free training on their site, but we heavily rely on third-party support. They do not hide anything from us. For every task and request, they freely advise us on how to perform better. The online portal also supports that motion.

After we established our requirements such as what we wanted to protect and where we wanted to deploy it, moving services to the solution took up to half a year.

Our implementation is not very advanced. There is an option to include very heavily scripted environments, but our use case is very straightforward. We have some customizations, but new team members require a month or maybe two to get onboarded. This is generally the time a user requires to get familiar with any system.

In our field of work, maintenance is almost a must. We do quarterly updates and health checks to verify that systems are working as intended. Maintenance is very fast, but the preparation work is the worst. We have to read all the changes and what is affecting us or not. Sometimes these releases or software updates break something, but in general, the maintenance tasks are very easy. They take about 15 minutes.

Our team consisted of two people. I was not the one who did the deployment.

It is not the priciest and it is not the cheapest. For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance. 

We have reviewed others. We actually have a solution with support from another vendor, but we are not utilizing them or paying for another solution.

We are using Alteon's Integrated WAF. We are in the process of evaluating moving to the cloud for more distributed protection from DDoS attacks and other threat actors.

I would definitely recommend it. It is very understandable. The interfaces and descriptions of various settings are straightforward. There are some misunderstandings here and there, but the basics to get it working are great. Overall, I would rate Alteon a nine out of ten.

Radware technology ensures the availability of all our applications. I represent a government institution that administers elections, so we have several critical systems that must stay online. In addition to Alteon, we use CloudWAF, CloudDDoS, and FireProof. 

We began seeing benefits immediately. This technology is necessary for availability in IT. Alteon helps us troubleshoot issues. It provides us statistics on application, server, and load balancer response that we can use to identify problems or latency. 

Alteon's integrated application protection helps us to protect our endpoints and our systems. CloudWAF is user-friendly and can be deployed with ERT. The learning time and processes you need to pass through are easy with CloudWAF.

Alteon's user interface could be improved. F5's user interface is more user-friendly than Radware's, but Radware's hardware performs better. 

I have used Alteon since 2008.

I rate Radware Alteon 10 out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Radware Alteon nine out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Radware support nine out of 10. They're high quality and work fast. 

Positive

I've also used F5, but Alteon is better. It also has better bandwidth, failover, and overall performance. Alteon is also more stable and requires fewer updates. 

Deploying Alteon was easy because I have experience in the load balancer world. It takes two engineers about four hours to deploy fully. We had help from a partner at the platform.

Alteon is priced competitively with F5, but F5 does much more marketing in this country. 

I rate Radware Alteon nine out of 10. 

We use Alteon to load-balance application traffic.

Alteon's primary benefit is cost-effectiveness. It costs considerably less than using multiple vendors. Deployment and configuration are also much easier. Alteon's analytics make troubleshooting easier. This is critical because when we deploy the analytics tools, we can create multiple server load-balancing parts, so we can identify high utilization in any core. If core utilization is high, your application isn't performing well. We can see that in the analytics tool and add alerts. 

It saves us a lot of time. When deploying multiple applications, it isn't easy to monitor each one. We can configure a threshold in the analytics tool for things like temperature, etc. For example, we created a policy limiting connections per second to 160 to 200. Alteon generates an alert if it goes beyond that. 

I like how easy it is to create policies in Alteon. Debugging and SSL offloading are also simple, and the global load-balancing part is good. Load-balancing and SSL offloading are the two features that ensure your virtual services work perfectly. 

You can deploy any application or service in One Arm SLB Configuration. In one-arm mode, both are in the same subnet, so it's effortless to deploy. We can take the application owner in the same IP range and deploy it. Our application should work easily, and it's simple to debug. 

In most cases, we are trying to deploy in one-arm mode, where the IP range is the same. You can also deploy in two-arm mode, where we deploy it two times and use the reverse proxy. Radware Alteon supports both modes. 

Multiple software bugs exist. Most of the time, they're issues with Radware's patching. The organization has a vulnerability and penetration team attempting to upgrade the system to version n minus one. If we have deployed the software to the n-minus-one range, the device isn't performing well because it's already in the testing version.

Version compatibility is a critical issue. If a vulnerability team or penetration team suggests you upgrade your device or server to the n-minus-one range once we are deployed, that's an issue. 

We get alerts in two formats: graph and decimal. The graph format is a good one, but it's not so easy to debug and prioritize issues. 

I have used Alteon for three years. 

Alteon is stable. We haven't had any issues. 

Alteon is scalable. 

I rate Radware support six out of 10. They have global support, so if you live in Asia, you can get support from the Asian team.

Neutral

I have also worked on Citrix and Fortinet Firewall. Radware is just as good as Citrix, and it performs better. Once Citrix was deployed on the server, we had multiple performance issues, and the load balancing could not happen properly. 

We also worked with Barracuda's WAF solution. There are multiple options, but Barracuda is a good one because of its dashboards and monitoring features. You can can custom policies, whereas Radware lacks customization options. 1

We can easily deploy Alteon in one-arm or two-arm modes. We can create the VRDCs for the RAM, CU, SSL offloading parts, CU limit, etc. We can have multiple applications on one virtual IP and configure services with multiple ports on the application. One person is enough to deploy the solution if they have the required knowledge. If you're deploying the hardware device, you need to check the power supply. It produces a lot of heat, so you need to set up adequate cooling.

Alteon is more cost-effective than other solutions. We have the Global Elastic License, which offers self-service. Cost-effectiveness is critical for any customer. I have worked on the hardware, software, and cloud versions. 

The hardware version performs well, but the total costs are high compared to the software version. You can deploy the software on the server based on the requirements for core size, RAM, etc., but the server has some lag. 

I rate Radware Alteon seven out of 10. There are two global leaders. F5 is one and Radware is the second. 

We have six to seven servers behind the scenes and a single IP. We use this product as a server load balancer.

The delivery has become faster. The user experience has improved. 

The round-robin distribution of the load is quite useful. It's fantastic. We've never faced any issues. 

The load balancing technology has improved our service performance.

We are using the server load balancing and then for Internet load balancing. We have two ISPs in my company which provide  the internet. I am using 100 Mbps on one, 100 Mbps on the other. If one is running at 80%, the other is running 60%, I'm getting almost 150%. So instead of using a single link, I'm able to use both.

Since business performance is critical, we like that we can take advantage of high availability.

Since implementing the solution, the performance has increased in my stores. It's helped us serve customers better and faster by at least 25%.

I've seen a 10% improvement in time to value.

Customer support could be better. The resolution time could be faster. 

I've used the solution for around six years. 

It's a very stable product.

We have around 400 people using the solution. The scalability is good. I started with four machines and I've since added to them. It's quite scalable. I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten.

The support is very good. However, there's always some improvement possible. 

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution.

We were able to implement the solution within one month. We did not receive any training from Radware.

There is no maintenance needed after deployment. We just have to renew the subscription. 

Our team managed the installation internally. 

We have witnessed an ROI, however, I do not have any specific KPIs. We have maybe saved 10% to 15% of our time.

We tend to choose solutions based on the Gartner Quadrant. It fits into that while also being cost-effective.

I'm a customer and end-user. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I'd recommend the solution to others. 

We use Alteon to secure our main web applications against web-based attacks such as SQL injections and DDoS attacks. We have around 36 VIPs on Radware, and we protect all our published sites, including those for FNU.

Alteon’s analytics has helped us save time when troubleshooting. It has given us greater visibility for troubleshooting the issues that cropped up in our environment.

Alteon has definitely helped reduce our maintenance overhead.

The best thing about Alteon is its automated threat detection and blocking. The university has resource limitations. I am the only one working for the security section, looking after seven products, including Alteon. The automatic blocking of threats and detections is crucial for us. Because there are a lot of things going on, we sometimes miss or do not see the detections on time. So, the most useful thing for us is to have a WAF that automatically blocks anything unusual or suspicious.

It is efficient and low maintenance. Once you set it up, you do not have to go back and look into it. It gives us peace of mind that if something comes up, it will block that.

There is room for improvement in reducing the number of false positives I receive. We could benefit from more configuration options to avoid these false positives, which can be overwhelming for a security analyst. It can be a bit difficult for a security analyst to go back and understand why a particular service was stopped. The false positives that I received can be a bit complex in nature.

We have been using Alteon for our web applications for four years.

We have not seen many issues with lagging or crashing. The box works well, and it either denies or allows traffic as expected. We have been using the same box since 2020. The boxes are quite robust.

I interacted with their support while applying our security policies. I was finding it challenging because we had false positives and some of the genuine university services were getting blocked. We have some legacy services. They were showing up as a threat. With the help of their support, we whitelisted those services.

The support is quite helpful. We do remote sessions and address issues timely. I would rate their support an eight out of ten considering the time difference challenges.

Positive

This is the second WAF that our organization is using. We used Barracuda WAF from 2018 to 2020. From a security perspective, Alteon has aggressive measures for security. At the end of the day, it gives you peace of mind.

Alteon has a better way of managing misconfigurations from the administrator's point of view. If I am creating a security policy, a VIP, or a new service and doing something wrong or misconfiguring something, it does not allow me to do that. That is one of the greatest advantages of Alteon, whereas Barracuda does not verify if your configuration is correct.

Price was the main reason for switching to Alteon. Barracuda charged us triple for the renewal, prompting the shift.

It was a bit difficult for us because Radware is quite aggressive in terms of configuration. We did not have the resources and training at the time. We were trying to implement a new product, and we found it to be a bit difficult.

The initial setup took about a month, but fully integrating services that were in Barracuda took us until last year. It took us a while to migrate all the services that were there.

It took us some time to realize its benefits. When we set up Alteon, we had a separate team of people looking after it. I was not the main person at that time. We had the initial setup done in 2020, and after that, the responsibility was shifted to me. I could see that there were certain things that we could do for better security of our web applications. We did have to do some fine-tuning to get the complete benefits of Alteon.

The trainings were purchased early last year, and I am now trained in using Radware Alteon services. The training did not take long. It took about five to seven days, but these days were not fully dedicated to the training. I was doing my work, and whenever I had free time, I would start the video and get trained. The training videos that are provided are quite straightforward and easy to understand.

The Radware team we work with always gives us the best price. As a university, our budget is limited. We need something that is the best solution but with a low or economical pricing. We are getting a better price than competitors. The shift from Barracuda to Alteon was primarily due to cost efficiency.

It is very economical, and the price fits our business needs.

I would recommend switching to Alteon but ensure training is completed before migration. This will ease the learning curve.

I would rate Alteon a nine out of ten.

We're an agency of a state government in India, and our primary use case of Radware Alteon in our organization is for load balancing and application protection.

We have to load-balance among multiple departments within the state government. Around 12 people manage Alteon, and the solution covers roughly 20 departments. 

Our agency launched several programs recently. For example, they're encouraging people to plant trees, and they need to upload a picture of the tree to the portal within a given window. Our previous load-balancing system failed to overcome that challenge. 

We needed improved application performance and availability during peak traffic. Traffic needed to be distributed evenly across data centers to prevent overloading and provide visibility into real-time performance and metrics. The government agency chose Alteon for its advanced load-balancing and application optimization features. There were immediate benefits in load-balancing and application performance.

Valuable features of Radware Alteon include global server load balancing, SSL offloading, Layer 7 load balancing, automation and traffic scaling, real-time analytics, and reporting.

Alteon's integrated application protection has helped us. As a state government agency, we face increasing threats and need to secure our critical web applications. 

Our finance websites are the primary targets for DDoS, SQL injections, and other sophisticated attacks. Traditional security is insufficient to defend against the volume and complexity of the attacks. We need protection against attacks on the application and infrastructure layers and DDoS attacks. Alteon offers visibility and actionable insights into each security event. 

Radware has free training available on their website. I've completed a few training courses and found them very helpful for me in my daily work. The basic course covering the UI takes a week, and it was easy to understand. When we're troubleshooting a scenario, we can check the Alteon knowledge base articles. The combination of training and the knowledge base shortens the learning curve. 

Alteon's user interface and usability can be improved by providing a more modern and streamlined design and focusing on simplifying workflows in the UI.

We have been using Radware Alteon for nearly four years.

I rate Radware Alteon's stability nine out of 10. We recently faced a GUI bug that disabled some options, but it was resolved by updating the device to a higher version. In the latest version, we had fewer GUI options, but it wasn't a major issue. We can still access those features from the command line. 

I rate Alteon's scalability 10 out of 10. It scales well within our organization.

I rate Radware support 10 out of 10. The Radware support team is very knowledgeable and quick in providing assistance.

Positive

Before Radware Alteon, the organization used a Windows server load-balancing solution that came with the operating system. Previously, those who worked faced time-consuming processes and reporting.

Alteon's initial setup was straightforward, and the UI was easy to understand. We had a few challenges integrating features, but Alteon's support helped us resolve them quickly. The only maintenance is regular updates. 

Using Radware Alteon has reduced the time we spend implementing load-balancing by about 70 to 80 percent. Setting up reporting and load-balancing on our previous solution took much more time. 

Our government agency opted for Radware Alteon due to its affordability and efficiency. While I can't say precisely how much it costs the organization, the price per device. In India, we always look for affordable products, so I assume Alteon is cost-effective because the government chose it.

I rate Radware Alteon nine out of 10. I recommend Radware Alteon because it offers comprehensive features for optimizing application delivery, improving network performance, and enhancing security. The basic training can be accessed through the Alteon website, which is user-friendly and helpful.

We primarily use Radware Alteon for load balancing our servers to ensure there are no bottlenecks and to have resiliency in place.

The most valuable features include the availability with an optional high-availability mode ensuring service continuity because of the resiliency. The interface is really good and easy to navigate, which makes configuring and managing settings quick. The support from Radware is consistently excellent and always available. It has helped reduce troubleshooting time by fifty percent, given everything is in the interface.

Integration with cloud services could be improved. Every now and then, we need engagement to address challenges with cloud integrations.

I have used the solution for two years.

I would rate its stability as nine point five out of ten. There is minimal downtime, and the solution is quite stable.

Alteon is a scalable solution. We have it deployed across multiple geographic locations, benefiting from load balancing resiliency.

The customer service and support are excellent. Radware always goes a step beyond to make their products stand out.

Neutral

I have had previous experience with other products, and Radware's support stands out as always available and willing to make products superior.

The time taken to troubleshoot issues has improved by fifty percent.

The implementation and running costs are quite high.

I would rate Alteon nine out of ten. The main reason I would recommend it is Radware's excellent support. I rate the overall solution nine out of ten.

We are using Radware Alteon in our data center as a link load balancer, service load balancer, and ADC.

In our data center, the biggest problem was handling the traffic. We have more than 9,000,000 consumers or electricity utility users. Handling the traffic was a little difficult, and the site was going down every one or two hours. We connected with multiple load-balancing companies such as RA Network, F5, Radware, etc. We found Radware Alteon to be the best because of three things. The first one was the product. The second one was the solution they provided, and the third one was the support team. The security features were also good, and we could use Pulse Secure for third-party SSL integration. The availability of the product was very quick. These were the main benefits of why we went for Radware Alteon 6420s.

Radware Alteon helped us to balance the links. Our data center is connected to almost 519 locations, and we have more than 9,000,000 users. Radware Alteon helped us to do the perfect load balancing so that the MPLS link and the ILL link that we are using in the data center get perfectly utilized, and there is no downtime. We have reduced the downtime for customers.

I like the ADC feature and the global certificate feature.

There are a few areas of improvement. It can be improved by combining the web application firewall (WAF) facility. 

The sandbox feature should be there. We have previously used an RA Network product for load balancing. They have a feature called Sandbox, but that feature is not there in Radware Alteon. This feature helps us to improve performance and security for application delivery.

Its GUI can be improved. Its GUI is a little old. 

We are based in India, but we get better support in other time zones. If Radware can establish a bigger support center in India so that we get support in Indian time, that would be helpful. In the international time zones, we get perfect support, but during the Indian time zone, we face a little bit of difficulty. There is a lot of waiting time. The turnaround time is also high during the Indian time zone, but during the international time zones, we get immediate support.

The scalability and reliability of the product are very good. Not much improvement is required there, but some security features can be improved.

We have been using Radware Alteon for the last four years.

Its stability is good, but it could be better.

There are add-on facilities for integrating with third-party SSL for security purposes. These facilities make this product scalable. Link load balancing, service load balancing, and the ADC part have scalability. If we do not have the physical nodes, we can get the virtual nodes, so this product is highly scalable.

I have taken the help of the experts and support multiple times. One instance was related to the upgrade to the Golden OS version, and one instance was related to the sanity check of the Radware configurations. I have also taken support for SAP link load balancing and implementation of third-party SSL. The support from them was great.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten. I have reduced two points because of the issue of support during Indian work hours. Their support during international times is very quick. Another issue is the email response time during Indian hours. It takes almost four hours. Radware is our hyperactive device, and in case it goes down, because of the delay in response, we might cross the SLA, but fortunately, it has never been down because we have the infrastructure in HA mode. We have one Radware, and there are active and passive nodes.

Positive

We were using F5 as a load balancer. We switched to Radware Alteon because it was very cost-effective. Another reason was its reliability and robustness. F5 was only doing the link load balancing, but with Radware Alteon, we got three features in the same product. We got ADC, link load balancing, and service link load balancing in a single package. The security feature for integrating a third-party SSL was also available. It helped us to implement all the demands of the customer for whom we implemented the data center.

In terms of the deployment model, it is a private data center, and the cloud provider is AWS.

Its deployment was straightforward. There was no complexity. We received multiple training sessions from the Radware team on configuration, taking backups, etc. We had also used the Alteon product previously for other engagements, so it was not a critical task. It was just a one-day or two-day learning process to get familiar with the environment. We already had the product knowledge.

We got an integrator called Robert Bosch. We had three people for deployment. You need only three people. One person is enough to do the mounting and hardware installation. You need one person who has good knowledge of application load balancing and how ADC works. You also need one person as a backup. These three people are enough to do the deployment of a single small site.

In terms of maintenance, it does not require much maintenance. It requires regular preventive maintenance such as OS upgradation or patch degradation, which we have done on our own. We have not faced any challenges compared to the other products that I have used in previous engagements, so in terms of maintenance, this device is good, and it has the ability to manage temperature and humidity. At the physical and configuration level, we have not found much difficulty in maintenance. The cooling system and the fan are perfectly placed. We have not had any hardware faults. It is a good product, and we are able to manage the product well.

Its pricing is very good. It is very competitive. Radware Alteon is the leader in the market. At a lesser price, we get a good product and also good support. Other vendors who provide load balancers charge separately for two items. You have the hardware cost, and you have the support cost, whereas, in the case of Radware, you get both in a single package.

We got a margin of up to 25% on the product. We got support almost free of cost. It was a very good deal with Radware. It was a win-win situation at both ends.

We did not evaluate other products. Radware Alteon was the first option given by the client. The client had specified Radware Alteon specifically because it had all three features. It was a bid requirement.

We found it valuable even before the purchase because of its specification or datasheet. When we compared the datasheet of Radware Alteon 6420s, it was a lot more attractive. It had more features than its competitors, so we realized its importance before the bid, but after using the device, we found it easier to implement as compared to other products.

I have already recommended it for multiple projects in our organization. I would advise selecting a proper model of Radware and also evaluating the specification. That is because if the specification is different and the model chosen is different, things would not work. That is the first point. The second point is that before purchasing the product, refer to the datasheet of the Alteaon product. I would also advise connecting with their presales team. During the purchase, we got connected with the Hyderabad office of Radware, and we got a lot of knowledge. 

In the PoC model, if we go for any Cisco product, we have the GNS3 tool or a web synthesizer. Similarly, if Radware can have a web synthesizer before buying the product that can be implemented in a virtual environment or in a testing environment, that will help us evaluate which product suits us the best. The second is the proper guidance from the SMEs. These two things will improve Radware sales and help with expansion.

We have used the out-of-the-box integration feature. We use OpenShift, but I have not worked with the automation script libraries for the orchestrator. With Radware Alteon, my role was to finalize the vendor and do the commissioning of the hardware. Most of the configuration part was done by another team from my company. My role was to select the product, get it connected to the Internet, and then do the setup of the network part. It was more of link load balancing.

I would rate Radware Alteon a nine out of ten.