A10 Networks Thunder ADC Reviews

Carrier-grade NAT is the purpose of using A10 Networks Thunder ADC at Turk Telekom Mobile.

It solved the CGNAT performance issues and, within two years, it had no problems and no outages.

The Deterministic CGNAT feature.

I would like to see the scalability numbers for the virtualized version which are comparable to those I noted in my answer on "Scalability."

One to three years.

Every six months we made active-passive changes and upgraded to the latest version of the firmware. But we didn’t have stabiliy issues.

It scaled well for our numbers, up to 3 million subscribers for our most crowded region.

Technical support was mostly provided by another company, but A10 also responded our questions on time and accurately.

We used F5 load-balancers for the same purpose before, but those devices weren’t meant to be built for CGNAT. F5 devices built for CGNAT were also functioning well according to PoC tests.

It was easy. The CLI of the devices are universal and we had to make the solution as simple as possible in order to get scalability.

F5.

I would advise doing comprehensive PoC tests for your specific purpose, for all products.

One of the main advantages of A10’s line of ADCs is that they offer an all-inclusive licensing scheme for their products. This scheme enables enterprises to save significantly on costs, and makes managing licenses easier. A10’s ADCs is a solid, high-performance platform. It supports advanced traffic management and scripting features and broad set of security features using a third-party web application firewall. Lastly, A10’s ADCs have IPv6 support which gives it an edge over other offerings in the market should IPv6 functionality be required.

Though A10 has a solid offering, they have an on-going legal battle with Brocade. Depending on how this plays out eventually, this is a risk that must be evaluated carefully. Support can also be a problem if you are in the United States, as its main contact centers are in Asia. Application integration with third-party development tools is also a problem, as there are limited integration options available. Finally, A10’s products has limited web acceleration support for mobile users. This can be a problem if the application is intended for this purpose, but custom scripting is available to help alleviate this issue.

Overall, A10’s ADCs are a good product with the price many companies can afford and have features that even some high-end ADCs. I recommend it for those companies looking for advanced features offered by the product yet wants to keep costs down. However, the future might not be bright for this company, and I highly suggest that existing and potential users follow the progress of their legal battle with Brocade. Long term support might suffer if they lose their case, which a cause of concern for both existing and future customers.