Exinda Reviews

As a company dealing in satellite technology, we use it for small to big satellite links, and for some remote islands in the South Pacific. The environments that it's deployed in range from corporate offices, to those remote islands, to vessels. It includes cruise boats and shipping containers, and extends to people in Papua New Guinea working in the mud.

We're an ISP. We use it more on the troubleshooting side. We'll have an Exinda per satellite service, and it allows us to see that portion of the link.

It's very much a hybrid. Most of it is in the hub: one big one in the hub location, and then a lot of remote ones.

The best benefit for us is on the troubleshooting side. You can stick it between you and another point of traffic. You can packet-capture some of that traffic and you can also see the traffic flow between the two devices. You can actually see what's going on and, as a result, we get involved less in arguments with customers. That makes customers happier. There is less arguing with customers regarding free ports and how the data is used, when you can actually produce a report for the customer. It has helped to reduce troubleshooting time a lot.

Also, when there is a satellite with a high latency, it helps to overcome some of that high latency.

Exinda has also enabled us to gain control over our network traffic, because some of our modems are not really that great at shaping. So if you stick the shaper in front of them, it's a little bit more gentle in dropping packets.

In addition, it has allowed us to maintain app performance without buying more bandwidth. For example, you can shape down traffic, like Windows updates. They will still work, even being fed in a trickle. You can prioritize all the work-related applications and therefore you can get more use out of your bandwidth, or you can customize it per customer.

It also enables us to repurpose bandwidth being consumed by rogue applications. While that doesn't save us any money, it makes us more competitive in the marketplace. A customer can either buy 50 Mb with us or 50 Mb with somebody else, but they'll get a 70 Mb feel with us because we can shape it a little bit better. It makes it less laggy.

The most valuable features are the 

• shaper
• accelerator 
• reporting.

The first of those is a shaper and not a policer. What I mean by that is it will shape the traffic better than, for example, a Cisco, because it's more gentle on the shaping side of things. Suppose you were selling a 20-meg link. Because you can shape to the Nth degree of traffic, the 20-meg link feels like about a 30 to 40-meg link.

We also use the Exinda dashboard to see what's happening in our network. Most of the time we would provide that type of information to the customer, so they can see for themselves what's going on. But on our end, it helps us to see if a spate of traffic is going in one direction, or if a whole bunch of weird packets are in there during Windows updates. A great example is that last Friday there were a whole bunch of Google phone updates. We could see that people were upgrading firmware on a remote island. The customer was saying they had bad bandwidth. We could tell them, "Hey, it's just Google updates. You can disable it, but that may cause other issues."

There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model.

Also, while I don't think it would be possible for them to do, it would be better if they had the Citrix support and the visualization to visualize your network.

Besides that, it fits its purpose as a shaper and accelerator. Some people would say things like, "Add a firewall to it," but I disagree. I think a firewall's a firewall, and Exinda's a shaper and accelerator.

I have been using Exinda for somewhere in the vicinity of five to six years.

The stability was terrible in version 7.0 but it's been good since version 7.2. There haven't been any recent issues.

My only complaint about the scalability would be that once you get over about 500 or 600 Mb, it does start to not be as compliant. We haven't spoken to them about it because I don't think they have pushed the envelope as far as we have. I don't think they would understand that part of it. It does what it needs to do. We are trying to make it do a little bit more.

We have plans to increase usage in the future. There has been a bit of a downturn with things like cruise boats, due to COVID, but once that picks back up again we should be fine and installing a lot more of them.

Our experience with their tech support started off well. Then, a couple of their employees went wayward, but they got them back and that made things a bit easier. But I cannot really complain about the technical support. You log a case and it does get sorted out.

Of late, it's been okay. It's been pretty good. We don't really use them that much now. With the number of people that we have and how long we have had Exinda for, we may have surpassed what they have been doing.

They have some issues at the moment with delivery and picking stuff up. They have outsourced a lot of that, which makes it a bit difficult, especially when you try to explain that the billing address is an Island and they keep asking for a street name. When there is no street, that does not compute in their system. You literally just send it to the island with a person's name because there are 55 people on the Island and they all know each other. There is no PO box. So that outsourcing has made things a little bit more difficult, but it's not the end of the world. It's still better than a lot of other vendors' technical support.

It was quite nice when Exinda had support in Australia. My complaint now is the time zones in which they support people and during which the accounts people work. I'm not saying they are not responsive, but it was much easier when we could actually pick up the phone and call somebody in Australia. It seems like AUS-PAC has been left to get support from Europe, as well as from an accounts perspective. Therefore, we don't get anyone to actually speak to live so we can say, "We'd like to buy these five things."

There's also nothing much in the way of pre-sales anymore. Previously, we had an account manager and a pre-sales person in here. We could actually ask the pre-sales person a question and he would go back and say, "Let me run this up. I'll let you know tomorrow." Tomorrow would come and he would say, "No," or he would say, "Yes." At the moment, there's none of that at all. We have to provide our own pre-sales for the product.

And sometimes getting a quote back from Europe takes time. If I was to send something in on a Monday, there's no one there on my Monday. I will have to wait a whole 24 hours before I get a response. For us, that may mean a deal will disappear. And if we ask if they have any stock in inventory in Australia, an answer can sometimes take 48 hours to arrive.

We had Riverbed, XipLink, and UniGateway. Before Exinda, we were playing with all of them at the same time. We still use a little bit of XipLink.

We decided to switch because we did a comparison. We ran six solutions side-by-side and we tested them based on speed of installation, reporting, acceleration, shaping, ease of use, and cost. We used an Excel spreadsheet and we got a whole bunch of test sites and we evaluated every single product that we could find.

It came down to three products: Riverbed and XipLink in addition to Exinda. Then the purchasing people went off and had a chat. They were able to bargain things down a little bit on price, so we picked Exinda. The cost drops a little bit when you buy a bigger domain license.

The con with Riverbed is that it was expensive. It has a lot of third-party add-on features that are, to be honest with you, a little bit better than Exinda on the add-on features, especially with things like Citrix.

Ziplink has a different format. It uses tunnels, which can be very good at times. You can use a tunnel to push traffic in a specific direction.

Exinda does not do the tunnels, but it is almost as good as Riverbed, although without the additional features. But then, the cost is much less, so you get better value for your money.

The setup is straightforward now, because we've put a script into the Exinda. So we just dump the config into the Exinda and it pretty much configures most of the stuff for us. But that's because we've put that effort into making it work fast. It's faster to configure an Exinda than, say, a XipLink or a Riverbed, in my opinion. And once you get it scripted, it makes things a lot easier.

To deploy the first one, before we had it scripted, it took us about a month. Now, with the script, it takes about 30 minutes. It only takes one person to deploy it. 

The script itself is just a basic satellite config. It has some basic satellite rules. It uses one-way shaping traffic. It does things like that for our network. It uses our DNS servers and all of that information, so we don't have to double-handle things and type everything in twice.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, we have a number of people who are all trained in different things. We have field techs who are trained in deployment and we have support engineers who are trained to support it. Overall, about 20 people are involved.

The number of end-users varies, because we have an island that uses. At one point there were 60,000 people on one island. And then there are cruise boats that can have 20,000 people. The total number of users might be close to 100,000.

I'm more on the technical side, but I see the return on investment when you can actually compete with somebody else who doesn't have one. It helps with retention. Customers who have asked for 50 Mb go to somebody else and they usually come back because they did not realize that 50 Mb of non-shaped, versus our 50 Mb, is not the same.

It does make my life easier, being able to troubleshoot something really fast. I'm able to see the traffic on a screen and I'm able to packet-capture quickly. I've never thought of it as a time saver, but it obviously is.

It is priced well for the market, for what it needs to do. We pay for a site license. It's a one-off fee.

The biggest things with Exinda are being able to shape and visualize and provide a customer with a report. It helps with being open and honest as well. Nine out of 10 times customers have access to the Exinda and so do we, so everything is completely transparent and honest. If they're not getting the 50 Mb, they can see it and we can see it. There's no hiding it, which is what I like a lot.

Look into it keeping in mind that it's a proper shaper and not just a policer. Look into those facts and understand a little bit more about it. I've seen a lot of customers still buying archaic shapers, but it's easier to shape something nicely than to just drop packets. "Shaper versus policer" is probably the best advice I can give. Make sure the shaper that you're buying is actually a proper shaper.

We use Exinda to control the bandwidth to different constituents on campus. 

We are better able to control what individuals and different people on campus are doing. We can prioritize certain things to students, certain things to faculty, and certain things to staff, by application. Similarly, we can slow down and give less of a priority to things that aren't important to certain groups. For example, staff doesn't need to be able to watch Netflix in high-definition while they're working, but students might, because the college is their home. The ability to do that was the reason that we put it in.

We use the solution's dashboard to see what's happening in our network. We look at it every day, but we don't monitor it consistently unless we think there's an issue. But it does play a role in our ability to make decisions related to what we see. One of the great things for us is that the solution works, and it works whether you're looking at it or not. For us, the fact that it keeps going and does everything that we need it to do, while we only check on it once a day, is great.

Particularly with COVID, we were concerned about what the bandwidth use was going to be like and whether we were going to be able to handle the change and what it would mean to have people working remotely. And when we came back to classes in the fall, we were concerned about whether were we going to be able to have the bandwidth if people here on campus were going to be holding a class that needed to have a virtual component. We used the Exinda to watch that and monitor it, and ultimately show that we were fine. We changed some of the priorities in the Exinda on traffic for certain things, like Zoom, and it made the difference for us.

The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the traffic at the application layer. It makes things a lot easier. We're not digging for port numbers and IP addresses and different services. We're able to say, "We need to make sure that Zoom is a priority for faculty." It makes us far more responsive in our ability to do things and speed up the process. We're a very small shop, so having something that's straightforward and easy to use is a big help.

The fact that we are more responsive is a big thing for us because, with the packet shaping solution we used to have, it took a lot of work to do anything. This is far more straightforward and easy to do.

It gives you the visibility into the things that you're doing, and you get suggestions as well. That's helpful. Every time there's a shift in what the population is doing, the Exinda recommends, "Hey, we're seeing a lot of Dropbox traffic. You don't have a rule for that. You should probably think about doing that." I also use it to watch the traffic on the internet. We have a few options for doing that, but one of the easiest is through the Exinda dashboard and the real-time monitoring.

One of the nice things that Exinda has enabled us to do is to set up the monitoring of certain things. We can monitor the response to our webpage. We can also monitor our different systems—some are cloud-based, some are here—and create service levels for monitoring so that we ensure that critical systems are up, running, and responding appropriately. 

Everybody is moving everything to the cloud. When they wanted to move our website from on-prem to the cloud, in the initial testing people were saying, "Well, it's a little slower," and I said, "Well, of course it's slower, because when you're on campus, you're not leaving to go to the internet to get to the webpage." I was actually able to show metrics of why that was and how. We still monitor that. It didn't ultimately change anybody's mind, but at least we were able to say, "You can't have the same level of service from the cloud that you get on-prem."

The updating of applications that the system knows about could be a little quicker. For example, Zoom had been out for a while, but it took a while for it to show up as an application that Exinda could natively handle. We had to write some things in order to handle Zoom, initially.

I have been using Exinda for almost five years.

We haven't had any problems. 

We've had a couple of issues that were really not impacting the network at all, but they impacted the way we used the device. We got a replacement and it was fine. Recently, we upgraded our internet pipes and didn't even give another thought to looking for a different solution. We just upgraded to new devices.

We had to change hardware because we changed our bandwidth, but I'm not sure that scalability is something I would think of when I think of the Exinda product, because you have to change it.

We have two 1-Gb internet pipes that we aggregate and then send through the Exinda. We normally service just over 3,000 people on campus, so we're pretty small. Right now, we are well below that with COVID. And normally, we see our traffic pretty close to utilized, but we're not even utilizing half our bandwidth at this point due to COVID.

GFI's technical support for this solution could be better. It's hard to find information about Exinda, directly. It seems like it's not a priority for them.

We used to use traditional packet shapers, and when we decided to replace that approach, we went with this solution which, rather than packet shaping, does more application shaping.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We worked on it for about a day.

It was implemented by the vendor that sold it to us, Annese; they have since been acquired by ConvergeOne. Our experience with the vendor was good. They gathered the information on what we were taking out and what was important to us. That implementation plan came through the statement of work through the vendor.

I'm the only person responsible for the administration of Exinda in our organization.

We have seen ROI with Exinda in that it is better than what we were using and it is certainly easier to manage. It impacts my time much less than the old solution and it gives me the visibility that I need into certain things. In terms of time saved, while this area is not a big part of my job, I'm the only one who does it. With Exinda I probably spend half the time that I would have on the old solution if I need to implement a rule change.

The pricing is on par with the other solutions.

We did some shopping around and we liked how Exinda handled things at the application layer, rather than packet-shaping. 

We looked at a newer version of what we were already using at that time. We wound up going through the reseller and talking with them about solutions. They recommended this and that's where we wound up.

Go through the training. The training time that I spent at Exinda was well worth it. I got a lot of insight from that.

Exinda also allows you to focus on application performance rather than just throttling traffic and bandwidth, although that's not something that we do. There are a lot of things that we could do with the stuff that we have, but we just don't have the shop to be able to monitor a lot of the things too closely. If we have a problem, we can go and look at stuff. We have things set up so that we can monitor some of these applications and some of the SLAs that we've set up. For example, we can watch the response time for the student information system, particularly, to make sure that it's always available to faculty and students.

We mainly use Exinda for traffic management, to make sure that our customers' traffic is prioritized.

Some of our customers don't want certain traffic to go through the network, so we can block or limit it.

We have voice applications that need to be prioritized. The voice would be terrible without Exinda.

We can analyze the performance of the different applications. It's used as a troubleshooting tool. It makes it easier for us to improve the efficiency of our troubleshooting process. It allows us to see what's going on.

The most valuable feature is the ability to create policies where we can tailor them to the customer. It enables us to prioritize apps and users for bandwidth.

Exinda allows us to see what's happening with our network and apps. We can actually monitor stuff in real-time. 

Exinda has not allowed us to also maintain app performance without buying more bandwidth because we generally allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to our customers. Our bandwidth depends on how many customers we have.

In terms of improvement, one thing that has always frustrated me about it is that when you look at real-time monitoring, you can only filter it by IP address. You can't filter it by anything else. It would be good if we could filter by VLAN.

I have been using Exinda for around five years at my current company but I have around 10 years of overall experience with it. 

The stability is okay. The model that we have is not the best in the range. Sometimes we do have issues related to performance. I think it has to do more with the model rather than the product.

They have different models in the range that we could upgrade to. 

Quite a lot of people at my company use Exinda for monitoring and to add in policies for customers.

It's currently being used in three locations. 

I haven't used support since GFI bought the company but some people I work with have said that the GFI technical support is really terrible.

It's a product we use all the time. I would think we've seen return from it. 

The price is okay. Although, our license for Exinda has low bandwidth. I don't know what the price has to be for more bandwidth. 

I don't think there are additional costs to the standard licensing. I think you just buy your bandwidth license every year. It's fairly simple.

I'm familiar with Blue Coat and Silver Peak.

One of the concerns that we've had with Exinda is the fact that ever since GFI took over Exinda, they haven't really put in much time into actually developing the product. That would be a concern going forward.

I would rate Exinda a six out of ten. The product's okay, we have concerns about GFI where they're not developing the product and the technical support isn't very good.