A10 Networks Thunder ADC Reviews

We are in the government sector and we use this solution for load balancing and application management.

The solution is user-friendly and the CLA troubleshooting is easier compared to other solutions.

There are competitors that have more features.

In a future release, I would like to see VAS, application policy management, profiling, and the SSL encryption and decryption features should be on the system instead of having a separate SSLi system. Additionally, they should combine the products into one solution instead of having separate products, such as encryption and decryption, and load balancing.

I have been using the solution for approximately four years.

The technical support is good.

I previously used F5 BIG-IP.

The implementation is easy.

The price of the maintenance support is too expensive.

I have evaluated Avi Networks.

If someone has experience in Cisco Networks, the CLA hierarchy and configuration are 90% the same making this solution easier to use.

I rate A10 Networks Thunder ADC a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is for servicing a remote workforce. Especially these days when a lot of people are working remotely, a solution like this is important. We have to deploy applications and we do not necessarily want to upload the applications into the cloud or locally on desktops or laptops. ADC is really good for desktop virtualization and application delivery. Instead of having a full client, you look at a projection hosted in the data center. All the processing is being done back in the data center in the corporate domain. Because of the fact that the processing is not being taken care of locally, ADC is a very lightweight client that handles the feed on your laptop. It also enhances security.  

Everything is kept in the server room, not exported locally to someone's house or whatever location they are working in. You do not have to worry about securing the data. There are certain programs that you have to patch a lot, like Adobe Flash — which seems to always need a patch. Instead of doing that on all 100 laptops that are in the field, you just do it once in the data center and everybody uses that same version. That type of simplification for your deployments is another benefit of ADC.  

Because the maintenance is all happening at the data center, it is a lot more controlled and it is way easier. Another thing that this helps with is that only certain people get access to certain applications. The accountants are really the only ones who need access to the accounting software. It is really easy to set up groups based upon Active Directory and then define who gets access to those applications. That ability to limit access is really kind of cool and can potentially save money and licensing costs.  

The most valuable parts of this product have to do with the efficiency of deployments and data security.  

Everybody says Network Thunder works as advertised. It is just one of those things that actually performs as advertised. I take no news as good news. I do not really have any negatives. We usually like to get well-balanced reviews from people who have experience with the product and especially from the vendors themselves.  

As far as improvements, that may be different than things that are missing or broken. I just do not have any cons. I do not have any glaringly big needs for additions either. One thing that might be improved is the interface. I think it is pretty straightforward. It is just not the prettiest, but it is functional. That is getting pretty granular.  

Maybe one concrete thing that they can improve on is their two-factor authentication. Just do something to make the native solution more robust. That would probably be the one thing that I have heard mentioned. They have basic two-factor authentication. It is also nice that they have options for integrating with other two-factor products. The problem with that is that then you have to buy two products and license two solutions. One customer made a comment saying that it would be nice if we only had to buy one product to take care of the whole solution. In other words, they thought it would be better to just be able to buy the A10 and not buy two products to create the two-factor authentication they would have preferred. That should be something that A10 could at least offer.  

We have been selling A10 ADC (Application Delivery Controller) over the past couple of years. We have been selling the load balancer for going on nine years.  

There are not really any nagging glitches or any kind of little ongoing annoying problems. Certainly, there are none that I have experienced and not that I have heard of from people using it. If there are ever any issues they are just normal, temporary issues that you expect when you work with technology. That is if you can consider anything that is a glitch to be normal.  

If we are talking about load balancing, then I can speak more about stability issues. But the Network Thunder ADC has mostly been very good. There was an issue a few years back with one of my customers and A10 addressed the problem and took care of it promptly. Isolated incidents can have to do with a lot of things within a larger architecture. It would be a problem with the architecture then, and not the product.   

We never really tried to scale the internal initial deployment hands-on. It has been left as is. More users have been added over time but nothing so crazy that it really required some type of scaling of the product. This company is a little over a hundred users. They are all using it remotely, from home, daily.  

Roles for the users are just all over the board.  

For just Network Thunder, I have not had to deal with the A10 technical support team. Our clients never said anything about how they like it one way or another. I assume that means they have not had to contact them either. There has just been one load balancing issue a client had and it was isolated to that location. A10 took care of it. They are one for one as far as tackling problems I know about.  

The installation is absolutely straightforward. Nothing more to say about that.  

As far as how many people are usually required to maintain it, in this company it is just one technician for 100 people using the product. His role is probably considered a straight system admin. It would not be a senior tech or even someone dedicated to the product.  

I can just say that it is cheaper than other solutions that are supposed to do the same thing. That is actually one of the reasons that customers chose it.  

It is a pretty good product. On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate A10 Networks Thunder ADC as a nine-out-of-ten. I do not get too many complaints from customers. Giving it a nine seems fair. It works as advertised.   

Our primary use case is the application delivery controller part where we mainly use the server load balancing features to front-end our back-end servers to give us additional high availability, some resiliency, and some failures.

All our applications are hosted on a private on-premises data center. We run our own data center with VMware being the main virtualization platform. Then, running on top of VMware, we have Windows and Linux clusters, so x86 Windows and x86 Linux.

Our biggest security concerns are malicious code, user data theft, DDoS attacks, insider attacks, brand damage/loss of confidence, and phishing/fake sites. Hacking/cyber defacement is one of our concerns, but not the biggest. A lot of these security concerns are around data loss and data loss prevention. We are a pension institution, so we do not want to lose any of our member data. We have security things in place using the application firewalls, as an example, to help with our front-end sites. 

We are running virtual machines and currently doing a proof of concept with containers. However, we're not working with containers on-prem yet.

It was our first step into having high availability. Before, we had a lot of things tied to one server. So, if that server/application were to crash, that would affect our users. By putting A10 Thunder in front of it, this improved our uptime and availability.

Our operations pretty much stayed the same. If anything, people got more relaxed. Because before we only had one server, and if that server went down, then we had to react rather quickly. Having multiple servers now in the APN front-ending it, if a server went down, then there may be three or four other servers sitting there doing the work.

We see a 21 to 50 percent change in traffic typically year-over-year. Our demographic is changing so we have more members who are coming to connect to get their financial statements. So, there is growth of our pension system.

One of the features that we really like is the services map, which is a way that we map traffic from the front-end virtual server to the back-end servers. 

Another feature we like is application switching. I'm using this as a template. 

A lot of our SSL management is done on the front-end side, so there is one pane of glass for a lot of our security certificates. It gives us visibility. It also falls under when certificates are going to expire. Even for servers that are coming down, we can see how that affects the traffic flow by using the services map.

Each release of the code is becoming more polished, not that I find it difficult today. I'm glad to see the features and enhancements we request are making it into every release. It is very simple to use.

We are starting to do a lot with containers and how the solution hooks into Kubernetes that we haven't explored. I'm hoping that they have a lot of hooks into Kubernetes. That would be the part for improvement: Marketing use cases with containers.

We are on our second set of boxes. For Thunder ADC, we have been using it since 2015 for probably four to five years now. 

The stability of the solution is really good.

There are fewer than 25 people deploying and maintaining this solution. Most of them are application engineers.

It scales well. We are using the hardware appliance. For us to scale up, we buy new hardware. We always buy bigger than what we need so that way we can grow into it.

Internally, we have close to 600 people using it. Externally, we have 400,000 to 500,000 active members who pass data through the device. Typically, everything is web browsing or API calls.

We do not have plans to increase usage at this time, but with the cloud coming up, that is a possibility.

The on-premise support is really good. From a support standpoint, if we have problems or anything like that, usually the case is solved within 24 hours. There have not been too many that went over that time frame. Obviously, that is key to keeping things up and running. We have fast resolution. 

The device is really solid and we don't need a lot of support. We may have one case a year, if that. This also speaks to how we're using the device. We just haven't hit a lot of bugs in the code or a lot of problems that we can't solve onsite.

We previously used a Microsoft solution. We switched because A10 has a lot more options. It is like day and night.

I would put the initial setup at an intermediate level. It is nothing that someone will be able to unbox and do without having some networking or application knowledge. However, if you have a firm IT understanding, then it is pretty simple.

Adding new things takes under 30 minutes.

A10 did not assist with our initial deployment, but I would tell everyone else to do that.

We do have an implementation process that people follow, but it is handled by another team.

I believe we have seen ROI. I don't regret our decision to purchase it.

I think people are scared to take a look at A10 because they're not F5. Now, F5 is their biggest competition. You get a lot more for your dollar with A10. So, I would tell people to give A10 a strong look.

We did try out the solution’s Harmony analytics and visibility controller for its one-year trial. Due to the cost, we chose not to keep it onsite.

We just pay for support in addition to our licensing.

We also evaluated F5. 

Because we were new in the market, our decision was purely based on cost. A10 can deliver the throughput we need, so there wasn't a technical challenge. It ended up being a cost-based decision.

Start off with Professional Services. It doesn't hurt to get 40 hours of Professional Services to help you stand it up. Usually, that's all you need. It is not a lot of hours. A week's worth of help goes a long way.

We can troubleshoot the traffic flow using the services map. Then, we can get flow data out of the device. So, I would rank the solution’s traffic flow management capabilities as adequate.

We plan to implement these technologies or strategies in the next three years: move from hardware appliances to software/scale-out solutions, DDoS protection, upgrade TLS/SSL capabilities to modern PFS/ECC encryption standards, and move to Office 365. DDoSs prevention is something that we're looking into. The web application firewall in the A10 is an option that we're exploring. SSL for strengthening our ciphers has been put on us by more of the user community, as we want to ensure our data is secure. Then, I see us moving more to a hybrid cloud model over the next three years, having more systems in the cloud and less on-prem.

We consider these benefits most important when funding new technology: revenue generation, cost savings, and operational improvements.

We haven't ventured into the solution’s support for expanding infrastructure to public, private, and hybrid cloud containers yet, but we will be.

We don't use a lot of the security features.

There is always room for improvement. I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

The A10s that we have in Florida are being used for load balancing. We have a pair of A10s there, an active and a standby, and we are balancing the traffic between. We also use our A10s, in general, for provisioning wireless products. Eventually, we will use our new A10s for more stuff.

Our applications are hosted in a private on-premises data center, on public cloud in AWS, and in a hybrid cloud which is primarily public infrastructure.

Among our biggest security concerns are malicious code and DDoS attacks.

We use the monitoring features and security features. The solution will tell us if someone tries to use the wrong password or to hack into the system. We do have firewalls in place so no incoming traffic from the outside can get in. Our firewall blocks everything coming in from the outside, but we can go out to our network.

We use the diagnostics to debug files and, when there is a problem, we can generate a file that we can send to our NOC engineers so they can take a look at it.

We also use the login resource usage which gives us a summary and graphs of services — when things are going down and are up.

The ADCs are pretty straightforward and easy to use. There is a GUI base where you can go in and see everything, but they also have a CLI base where you can use a command and get the information that you want, very fast. You log into the website with the A10 GUI and you can see all of your functions and your health monitor, which is very important. With the health monitor you can see the health of the switch and, if something is going on, how it's progressing. Also upgrading the GUI is very easy. It's user-friendly.

The traffic management is very good. I can monitor the traffic that comes into the A10 very easily. We balance traffic between the active blade and the standby blade. The traffic management is holding its load properly and its balancing properly. It's very good.

In terms of the traffic flow management capabilities, there are graphs that you can look at as you enable them. You can look back at live data for the last 30 minutes and it's very good. I like it. You can manage your traffic easily and you can troubleshoot because, if you look back at your data for the past two weeks, you can see if something was flipping. It's a good feature.

There is room for improvement in the upgrading process. Sometimes we have to contact A10 for verification of some stuff.

We have had A10s for about 10 or 12 years, in our Florida market. Our company merged with two other companies, so we inherited som A10s. Those are in Florida and those are the ones we have had for 10 or 12 years. They are TH3030S models.

We also purchased an A10 about a year ago and just finished configuring it, although it's not in full usage yet. This one is a TH4430S.

So far, the stability has been very good. We haven't had much of a problem.

As I said, we don't use them for too much, just for load balancing and our 911 service. We have different internal switches that are connected to the A10 to load-balance the traffic, so we don't use the A10s 100 percent but between 20 and 50 percent for now. But as time goes by we are going to be using them more.

We currently have about 25 to 30 people who log into it to do provisioning on a daily basis. 

As for our plans to implement technologies or strategies in the next three years, we may look at moving from hardware appliances to software/scale-out solutions. Our company is always looking at new solutions to meet market needs. We will also look at multi-cloud failover, upgrading from TLS/SSL capabilities to modern PFS/ECC encryption standards, and moving applications to the public cloud.

We have used their tech support a few times. They're quick to answer the call and they respond to you in a timely manner. Their engineers are pretty good. They will join a WebEx session and look into the switch for you and try to resolve your problems. They resolve issues in a timely manner.

We used F5 BIG-IPs. The switch to ADC was an upper-level decision. They wanted to change because things were outdated and it had to do with contracts and the like.

The things we consider most important when funding new technology are revenue generation, customer satisfaction, operational improvement, accelerating development speed, and business advantages from new technology.

The setup was very straightforward but it depends on the solutions you are using in your environment.  In our network we don't configure all the features because we are not using them as yet, but it's very straightforward to configure them.

In our department, setup takes six to seven months, including getting the ADCs, racking and stacking them, and configuring them. Our organization has a standardized, tailored deployment strategy, where we have our own config, but it has to be coordinated with our other switches.

We have four to five people involved in the deployment of the solution. Our local engineers will install it, power it up, and give us a remote connection and then I, as a network engineer, will get in remotely and configure it.

It's very simple to use, as long as you understand the engineering technology behind it. I would advise going with it. Make sure you have the GUI feature on it so that you can go in and do quick, at-a-glance monitoring.

The solution is good for load-balancing your traffic. We don't want to overload other switches, so we pass traffic through the A10 and load-balance it. It also helps us to troubleshoot issues within our network.

My primary use case is to use it as a software load balancer. 

Because of the industry that we operate in, we cannot use cloud. Therefore, we use it on-premise. We have 32 medium boxes, and that's what runs production.

A10 explained why the latency dropped significantly on a site that we have.

It gives me information on load balancing and offloading, which provides me information on performance.

I use SSL, TSL, and additional offloading. With additional offloading, this is where I can put my certificate on A10, as servers don't have the capability.

It has allowed us to smooth out our traffic.

The ease of use could have been created better. Some of the UI features are very primitive. Sometimes, wrong entries will go in and stay. I gave this feedback to the team who sold it to me. 

Also, some things like the traffic flow management take a lot of time to learn to use. While we have mastered using the feature, it doesn't tell us where we are going wrong or if something is breaking.

It will start failing if you have a containerized environment, which is why we have to start moving away from using the A10. If they could fix this, that would be good. 

It would be also be nice if someone could walk me through the solution’s Secure Service Mesh to optimize traffic within Kubernetes and containers, since I am not able to use A10 for rebalancing right now.

While I do use the security features on the load balancing, I find them to be primitive.

I can't complain about its stability.

My engineering managers, with help of the DevOps team, manage the deployment. They have become self-sufficient and, with zero impact, they patch the servers in broad daylight, meaning mid-week.

I haven't needed to vertically scale beyond this box. It does scale horizontally.

The journey started with four servers and two websites and now I run close to 32 servers and service 36 applications, consisting of Web, application, and microservices. CPU utilization has moved marginally, by about three percent.

Troubleshooting always results in us contacting the tech support team and have a solutions expert, who is part of the sales team, send us helpful information. The solution expert is phenomenal, which is not the same experience that I have with the technical support.

I haven't been impressed with the technical support, though. When we need help, there is less support staff than we would like in the time that we need them. E.g., it may take an hour and a half to get assistance during an emergency. 

I would like them to provide learning tips and a community forum. where users can share ideas. They need more detailed support articles on the A10 website.

Before A10, I was using Network Load Balancing from Windows, which came pre-bundled and was primitive. I wanted to move to a professional version where I would have more control. I evaluated a couple of products and A10 seemed to be the clear winner. I had very simple parameters: the latency of response from our servers. The benchmark was NLB. When we compared the numbers with A10 and, when configured properly, it reduced the latency by roughly 15 percent.

There is absolutely no comparison between A10 and Windows load balancing.

The initial setup wasn't complex. A10 helped us with the setup. 

It took seven days to go into production, which was due to number of sites that we were running.

Implementation strategy:

1. It should have the ability, as a load balancer, to manage circuits.
2. Not everyone should have access to it.

I created a replica of the production box. Then, I set up the service, which I put on the load balancer. For 15 minutes, I moved the traffic from my NLB through A10 and monitored the performance. Then, I moved it back and it gave me the confidence that it could run safely. Then, I did the same for all 36 sites that I run. Afterwards, I moved it over to my team.

A10's solution expert helped us configure the box.

A third-party called Value Point helped us with the deployment. I was not impressed with their skills. 

For the deployment, there were two or three people from my team, two or three people coming from Value Point, and two from A10.

It's a phenomenal investment that the company has made.  

It improves our performance and management saving us money. 

There were budgetary constraints that keep us from investing in the single pane of glass traffic management feature. We saw a demo of this feature about a year to a year and a half ago.

We have not looked into any other options.

Go for it. 

It's always better to go with a nimble, growing company. Partner your growth with their journey. It's always beneficial for a stable setup. 

We are using ADC for load balancing. Most of our enterprise applications are behind ADC.

It's on-premise.

It has definitely improved the way our organization performs. Our company is mostly an education institution. We have a campus and an administration where we host all the enterprise applications. With enterprise applications going to six separate entities, it requires a lot of hardware underlying the applications. So load balancing has worked very well.

It definitely has enhanced our application security and our application accessibility. We don't have to go with the original application, the built-in, round-robin kind of thing. The security features, like SSL version 3.0 or TLS 1.2, mean it has pretty good options in the way the application can be configured to make it more secure, as well as the number of servers that are behind it and the way it chooses its servers.

The features we have used are basically for load balancing. The round-robin feature, the persistent cookies, the source IPs, source mapping, we use all of that in our situation. 

They also have a feature I use frequently. We have two appliances and I'm able to move my application from one appliance to another. I don't have to move my whole A10 to be active on the other side or to be passive on the other side. If an application is having a problem, I can just move it using a command. That is really interesting and very appropriate for our environment.

It's very easy to use. The commands are easy to use. I have used a couple of other load balancers and I find A10 to be the easiest one. The language and the commands are easier, as is the layout. Even the technology behind it all just links together, so it's pretty easy to use. You just follow the steps and you're good.

Within load balancing, we use some of the security features as well, such as the source mapping. We make sure that everything goes in and out from A10 itself. That makes the messages more secure too. We know what's going in and what's going out. It captures their source IP addresses if we want it to. The VRRP solution is also good. It has automatic failover.

It also has a Virtual Chassis System, although we don't use it. But we do have the option of creating virtual chassis, so that gives it a bit more security. If we find an application which is not going to play well in the main pool, we can easily create a virtual chassis and have that application in that virtual chassis. With the virtual chassis we can also create system partitions and have a test system for test applications and have the others elsewhere.

The solution does logging, but the logging capacity is really small. Because we have a bunch of traffic here, we usually get a logging-side warning that "This many logs were lost because of the heavy traffic." If the logging was better, that would be very good.

It has security features like DDoS and WAF, but they are not updated automatically. If any new vulnerability comes out, you are given an option to update that vulnerability in your system and the actual firewalls. Because, for ADC, this is just an added feature, it's not the main security solution right now. It's not the only security that any company would have. There is an opportunity to modify that and make it better.

I don't want to jinx it, but it's pretty stable. There are times where we don't even have to reboot it for a year. We would look at the time and say, "Oh, it's been like 270 days. We haven't rebooted. Let's schedule it to reboot." Otherwise, it's very smooth.

The scalability depends on the resources you have. We do have resources so we are on the higher end in terms of what we bought, and we do have the scalability built-in. We are not using the virtual chassis. But if we want to expand it and have partitions created, to create a separate virtual chassis, we do have that scalability. If we need to add another appliance to it, the process is pretty simple. So it's scalable.

There are talks, internally, that all our applications should be behind ADC. As soon as we get to that level, even if it is just one server-application, the application will be behind ADC. Right now, we have our major enterprise applications, our major ERP systems, our email systems, and our tier-one applications behind ADC.

They do have support and it is wonderful. We are on the highest support level. It's very good, even excellent.

We were using another product. The main things that attracted us - I saw it a conference where there was a demo - were the pricing at that time, the functionality, and the stability. Of course, we continued afterward doing a little bit more research. A10 was still trying to get its foot into the market over here and they were very helpful. I do not have any regrets switching over to A10.

Initially, we deployed it because of our learning management system, which I was handling. It is Linux-based and it required load balancers. We moved to A10 from another load balancer at least in part because of the better pricing. Also, it was doing Layer 4 and Layer 7 and that's what was required.

The initial setup is pretty simple if you have the guide. It's just like a basic switch on any appliance deployment. Deployment is not hard.

When we initially did it, this was a new product, of course, so we had support do the deployment. But when we changed the appliance, I did it myself, moving from one to another and doing the initial configuration. It's more a matter of the paperwork that you do on the network, and how it will change. But the deployment itself on A10, like configuring your settings, etc., takes no more than two or three hours. If you have your paperwork done, it's pretty easy.

When you move into this solution there is a learning curve if you come from another one. But once you get used to it and you know how things are flowing, it's pretty good.

When we bought A10 and we moved to it, we did have the A10 consultants help us.

Our experience with them was excellent. They were eager to do it. At that time, A10 was pretty new over here. From the support to the administration, everybody was eager to help out, to get it deployed and be successful.

We pay for it on a yearly basis. There is standard licensing for the number of controllers; that just came into existence last year. Other than that, there's just the support: Basic or Gold Support, etc.

In implementing A10, you need to keep in mind your end goal, what is it that you desire? If you're looking for more DDoS, or if you're looking for more firewall-type of capabilities, then you might have to do a little bit more consultation. But if you're looking for ADC and trying to see separation and load balancing, A10 does the job and provides security very well. It has both CLI and a web interface, so it's not too congested nor does it look too busy. Its appearance is very soothing and relaxing so that helps.

It does have the reporting capabilities and the capability to send logs to an external device. If you feel comfortable with Linux, you can really expand its usage. It depends on what your company goals are.

Overall, A10 ADC is pretty good. It's reasonably priced and easy to use.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using ADC is that I have to keep on learning it. The good thing is that even when they do firmware upgrades, there are minor tweaks but it's not ever-changing firmware where we have to upgrade. That's a good thing about A10. I have other applications that I am responsible for and they generally have frequent upgrades and you have to do them or you won't be supported. But I have not gotten into that situation with A10. That's a huge advantage for us, being in the education field, because there are semesters during all 12 months of the year. There are very few windows in which we can actually bring down appliances and upgrade them. Maintenance-wise, with A10, we have not had that problem.

We have the solution’s Harmony analytics and visibility controller but I would not say that it has enabled us to proactively detect, anticipate, or resolve issues before they become problems. It does give very good reporting, but we have not had any issues that it told me about first-hand - or maybe we are not configured in that way. But it's a very good reporting tool and a very good graphical analyzer.

As for deployment and maintenance of the solution, it's only me.

Regarding the solution's single pane of glass traffic management, I don't think we have used any feature for traffic management. At the back-end we have very good bandwidth and, the way it is positioned in the network, the agent doesn't have to do any traffic management. We are not at the saturation point. We are even below the midpoint on traffic.

The solution hasn't affected our operations efficiency because we offer the solution to our applications team, if they need to have their applications behind A10. We just changed data centers, moved into a new building. We are at a stage where we would like, and there are talks, to have all our applications behind ADC, just for security, to have that separation from the users, but we are not there yet.

It is a work in progress. Initially, when we deployed A10, it was the demand of an application that we have a load balancer in place so that it could load balance among the ten different servers the application needed. But now, it has improved our decision-making where, if added security is needed, the application team would say, "Okay, let's put it on A10 for the off-loading, etc." Other features that a server would normally do are conducted by A10, which means a little less load on the server side. That helps the application efficiency.

We are in the process of using the WAF, the web application firewall, from A10. It's not the main firewall product, obviously, but we have found it to be interesting. We are trying to implement it. We are in learning mode right now.

The primary use case is server load balancing.

We use the on-premise deployment model.

It has provided improvement in regards to flexibility of our applications between data centers.

It does improve operational efficiency, but it's not overwhelming.

The Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) is simple to use.

It's not easy to use (mediocre at best). It's difficult for administrators to maneuver through the web user interface. It should be more intuitive through the web GUI. If you're a command line person, you can get around. However, the web UI is very difficult, and for our operational folks, they need the web UI.

The solution’s security features are minimal. I'm not impressed by the DDoS solution.

Traffic flow issues are very difficult, as there's no means for us to analyze the traffic coming in or out of the appliance without technical support. 

They need to improve in-depth diagnostics. I don't know how to do a tcpdump on the appliance. We need to do packet captures on the appliance to analyze what's going through it. Information is not as easy to attain as it is with other vendors. Better diagnostic tools would probably help.

Stability has been fine. It's been stable.

We upgraded our solution last year.

For deployment and maintenance, we only need a couple of administrators (less than 10 people).

The scalability is appropriate.

It's moving along based on the business growth, so there are no plans to increase usage.

The technical support is not great, but they are not poor either. They're fair. We don't open a support case that often, but when we do, it's not immediate as far as their response. When they do respond, they come up with a collaboration to troubleshoot or find an answer. So, it's fair at best.

The solution's support for our on-premise applications do their job. The basic functionalities for on-prem services are okay. They're not anything great. They do what they're supposed to do.

We previously had F5 and switched because of costs. 

We are able to do the same things (as the previous solution), but it is cheaper when we have to renew.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took three to four months.

We were pretty familiar with the product, so we did the deployment ourselves.

It has broken even on ROI. We haven't lost any, which is good, but we haven't gained anything.

It is $7000 per unit for the support annually.

It does do the job, if your environment is simplistic enough. The product is fair for its market.

We test and used the single pane of glass traffic management, but we don't use that now. We went away from that. Now, we administer our devices individually.

We use A10 Networks Thunder ADC for the application delivery controller. 

The solution is flexible. 

The tool's load-balancing feature should improve. 

I have been working with the solution for three years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

My experience with the support team is good. 

Neutral

A10 Networks Thunder ADC's installation is complex, and the documentation is very bad. 

A10 Networks Thunder ADC is complex, and you need to spend time installing it. I rate it a seven out of ten.