A10 Thunder TPS Reviews

We have our own data center, and we perform load balancing for a lot of internal and external services using A10 Thunder TPS. For some users, we use A10 Thunder TPS for HTTP protocol. We perform load balancing for HTTPS on A10 Thunder TPS and others with too much workload we have to do on the servers. We cannot do the load balancing using HTTPS.

There is a limitation for SSL communication, but we had a problem with our application that started to hang. So, we had to change the SSL certificate to this server.

The most valuable feature of A10 Thunder TPS is load balancing.

The most valuable feature of the solution is protecting customers and supporting them against attacks in Brazil.

In the tool, we use a lot of its DDoS protection features to protect the resources in a link. It also helps mitigate attacks so that users don't face problems because of it.

One problem for me with A10 Thunder TPS is that the box comes from another country in Brazil. In the tool, there is no one key to block it. For example, in F5 Networks, we have a key. If you try to buy another box from Huawei or from F5 and try to enable them in A10 Thunder TPS, you need a key to do it. The problem here is when you buy another box from A10, they want to put Thunder TPS to run, and it works okay, after which we cannot block it for another solution to be used, which is a problem for me where improvements are needed.

Thunder TPS protects your network from DDoS attacks. 

Our company experienced some DDoS attacks that temporarily took down parts of the network. The manual process we had in place took some time to execute, and Thunder TPS offered better mitigation methods so we could block malicious IP addresses at the edge of the network.

I use the solution to check the tickets and reports of the configuration site.

The solution is easy to use.

We use it for DDoS mitigation. Availability is extremely critical to our business. We provide online services for two, large video game titles, so there's a requirement to keep our game online and for our players to be able to play the game.

We use it on-prem.

Due to the availability and power of these devices, we've been able to ramp off our upstream cloud-scrubbing provider and handle all attacks on our own. Right now 100 percent of our attacks are handled on-prem with these devices. In 2019 - we're nine months into the year - we've had 1,500-plus attacks and less than five of those attacks have had impact on us.

Our current setup is two 6435 TPS devices at each location. Each of those boxes is rated for 155 Gigs of traffic. We currently are sending 100 Gigs of traffic to each box, that's the bandwidth of the line that we have coming in, and we successfully mitigated a 163-Gig attack. That one was successfully mitigated within the last month by those devices.

In terms of increased availability, I would say it's at about 99.999 percent, overall. We haven't had any major impact, anything more than five minutes, in about two or three years now, due to DDoS.

The automation in TPS makes my team more productive. There is less manual work for my team in dealing with attacks, and with other functions as well, because that automation is built-in: An incident is created, the attack is mitigated, and a report is created. There's really zero touch at this point in time for attacks. It has very much reduced the amount of manual intervention required during an attack.

That is especially true with the newest upgrades that just came out where it does automated pcaps. Everything that we need at this point in time is automated. The device automatically goes into mitigation. It gets the pcaps for us and, a large percentage of the time, it just blocks the traffic that we're looking for. Having those pcaps also helps out because in the future, when we're looking at attacks where we may not have either signature or a proper remediation, we can actually build that in based on the data that we're receiving from those pcaps.

Using TPS we have detected a lot more small attacks and attacks that we had been missing previously, but that's not only because of TPS. We do gather flow information from the TPS devices as well as from our border routers that we recently upgraded. We're using FlowTraq. With that combination, we are seeing a large increase in the number of DDoS attacks that we're detecting compared to what we were using previously, which was a third-party cloud provider. On average, we're detecting anywhere from 25 to 50 more attacks per week than we did previously.

We work like an MSSP. We provide massive capacity and other network capacity to customers. We have customers connect anywhere on back burn. It can be in Europe. It can be in the US or in Asia. We plug the attack anywhere on the back burn, trying plug the attack closest to the source of the attack. So, we don't work like all the other guys who do scrubbing centers. We try to build a scrubbing network. That is why we need to buy more TPS in order to be distributive.

When we start to work with the customer, we don't know what they have. The goal for them is to be able to block any type of massive volume metric attack. The reason is why we have about a two terabytes capacity and are building to afford three to four terabytes of capacity. Therefore, anytime the customer needs to block something, we can configure for them any type of custom role.

We are using them for a mitigation offer that we have globally. We have a bunch of A10s and will deploy more in a few weeks.

We use both the hardware and software.

We started with them and built our network based on this solution. We started with them directly from scratch.

The automation makes our team more efficient and productive. We are distributed and don't use the A10 Portal. It's easy for us to deploy. E.g., they have an aGalaxy product. Instead of connecting to all the boxes, so we will have the A10 box. We don't want to send a code to all the A10 boxes. We will just send the information to one box: the A10 aGalaxy. This one box will proxy it and send the information all the other boxes. This is exactly what we are doing today. It has improved the way that we are working.

As a cloud infrastructure and hosting company, we provide public and private cloud services. We use the A10 technology to protect our customers against DDoS attacks against their hosting instances. The latter could be dedicated servers or virtual servers or data storage platforms.

We have technology in place to detect attacks at the border routers of our networks in all 20 data centers worldwide where we operate. If we detect an attack, we reroute the traffic of the IP addresses that are being attacked to the A10 Thunder systems. They drop the malicious attack traffic and they pass through the legitimate traffic to the servers or the virtual servers that our customers use.

We deploy different types, different sizes of equipment. We use these solutions on-premises.

When we started deploying this and we measured the impact on the number of customer complaints, we saw a significant reduction in the overall number of customer tickets. If customers have an issue with one of our servers, they open a ticket; that could be any outage or a DDoS attack. We saw an overall reduction of 11 percent in support tickets.

But we also saw that we were typically able to mitigate over 98 percent of all the attacks that we detect. That has a two-fold benefit. First of all, customers are happier because their service stays alive even in a situation where they are being attacked. And for us, it has a positive impact on our support team because it has 11 percent fewer tickets it needs to handle. That's especially true since "attack tickets" are not nice tickets to have to handle. It also helped us a little bit in the engagement and the motivation of our support team.

A10 has also definitely reduced the amount of manual intervention required during an attack. Before we had these systems in place, if an IP address or server was attacked above a certain level, we would manually no-route or "black-hole" the traffic, and basically remove that IP address from the internet. That was all manual work, while customers were complaining, and their customers were complaining. People were opening tickets. With this solution in place, all that manual work no longer has to happen. After detection of an attack, the scrubbing is initiated automatically. In the case of a huge attack, we will still null-route the traffic which is going to the IP address under attack, but that process is fully automated. So deploying these systems has reduced a lot of the manual work.

Using this solution we have also, to some extent, detected more small attacks, attacks that we had been missing previously. Before we deployed A10, we did not have any technology in place to detect an attack. Only if a customer opened a ticket did we know there was an attack. But when we started deploying the detection technology and the A10 scrubbing technology, we suddenly saw that we actually have a lot of smaller attacks as well, which were invisible to us previously. That means, most likely, that there were a lot of unhappy customers - or unhappy end-users of our customers' systems - that we were never aware of. That was suddenly fixed by deploying these systems. In all of 2018, we identified about 400 attacks each day, anywhere in our 20 data centers around the world. Many of these attacks were invisible to us before 2016 when we did not have this solution in place.

When it comes to the solution's performance given its form factors, for us, any equipment that takes up space and power is using scarce resources in a data center. The fact that these boxes do have a small form-factor, as only 1RU or 2RU devices, and that the power consumption is relatively low, is very beneficial for us.

We don't deliberately use the solution's machine-learning powered Zero-day Automated Protection (ZAP) but the systems require very little effort to keep them alive and manage them. The automation and the updates that A10 built in result in there being very little work for us to do to keep these systems up to date and efficient in the way they scrub attack traffic. So it's not functionality that we deliberately use, but it's a benefit of these systems, which helps us maintain a low cost of operations and an effective system.

The solution's automation also has the effect that the systems are very low-maintenance. That means that we can free up our people to do other work.