Radware Alteon Reviews

We use Alteon as a web application firewall and also for load balancing. It has an integrated firewall inside of Alteon that we use for our public-facing web servers. The Alteon hardware is deployed at one location, but we use virtualized appliances in our DR environment. The company has around 5,000 employees and about 150,000 customers. We have about $7 billion in revenue annually. 

They have different lines of the same series. I believe we're on 6024, so ours is an older line. We can't get some of the features because it doesn't have the hardware to support them. However, the code is seamless across the platforms. The D Line is the new one.

When our companies separated, we converted an F5 config to Radware, which is much easier to operate overall. The upgrades were smooth with F5, but Alteon works better for our small team. Operationally, the care and feeding process is more straightforward, and it's easier to learn how to use the load balancer side of the tool. The AppWall portion is a little more complicated, but the load balancer is effortless to learn. 

With Alteon, the load-balancing options are practically unlimited. We haven't had any issues with offloading, decryption, putting in cookies, or any other load-balancing features. We can check URLs, etc., on the backend for load balancing instead of running a TCP check. We're also doing some certificate stuff on there. Alteon covers all of the standard load-balancing techniques, and we employ most of them daily. 

I've used the application performance monitoring features 100,000 times to get backup captures out of it because it's offloading some traffic. It helped several times because I can take a packet capture out of it and analyze it myself. I don't know if the load balancer did anything for me besides allowing me to take those static captures, but it helped in those aspects.

The integrated application protection could be better. It works well overall, but the reporting isn't great, and the GUI is somewhat quirky. We had to have Java at first, but now we don't need to have it anymore. It's still a little clunky. I also wish the updates went a little easier. When you upload a new code to it, there are some optional boxes that you need to uncheck. You'll waste an hour doing it, but it does nothing.  

We took a training class because only those who work for Radware know how to do this out of the gate. It's fine once we got the hang of it. There are lots of options, and every technology has its learning curve. 

We don't integrate anything with it because most applications don't integrate with Radware. If it were F5, we could integrate it. We can integrate F5 with practically anything that integrates with a load balancer, but that's not the case with Alteon. 

If you get the D Line, you can use some of the more advanced reporting features that come standard. The reporting on our current version is atrocious. It doesn't have anything unless you buy the license. It has a lot of data, but the reporting could be a little.

We have been using Alteon for seven or eight years. My company was one of the first in North America to adopt the platform. 

Alteon is tremendously stable. We've had issues with the code, but none of it affects the data plane or anything operationally. When we've had failures, Alteon failed over seamlessly. 

Adding some SSL licensing and upgrading the RAM was fast and easy. I don't see why it wouldn't scale. I haven't scaled it, but I don't think it would be difficult. 

I rate Radware support a nine out of ten. Our salespeople were excellent, and their engineering team is highly responsive. Sometimes, we need to press for the right classification when we're raising a ticket, but I don't have any complaints. 

Positive

We started on Radware, but we used F5 previously. We switched to Alteon primarily because our team didn't like the amount of care, and feeding F5 required to get it to where it needed to be. F5's upgrade process was challenging. We never had that problem with Alteon. 

Alteon is a hardware-based platform. We have two Alteon 6024s that run in active-active or active-passive modes. Each VX runs seven virtualized load balancers. The deployment process was terrific. Radware's sales engineers took our F5 code and converted everything for us. We built it, installed it, and turned it on. 

We had to go back and double-check a few minor things like sessions, retention, etc. Overall, it was a seamless transition from one platform to another. Getting the team trained on the AppWall feature took a few months. Our documentation is excellent, and the support team is great. We learned it quickly.

I deployed Alteon with one other person from my company, but we also had Radware's support team assisting us. We didn't pay for the implementation. They helped us convert the code. Then we did it ourselves with their guidance. 

Alteon paid for itself quickly. We spent an entire week in the data center getting this product operational. The hardware lifecycle is 10 years, which is unheard of in IT today. The licenses for software and support are reasonable. Overall, I'd estimate we've seen a tenfold ROI. Some competitors in the space cost twice as much. It's a good investment for a mid-sized company with 3,000 to 5,000 employees. 

We started seeing benefits immediately with the built-in AppWall. You only have to pay for a license, which is super cheap. Having the built-in web application firewall made things effortless because the load balancer was catching a lot of our front-end traffic and moving in web servers. We looked at other products that cost 10 times as much when we were still growing. 

The return on investment was almost immediate. Everything else in the space was twice as much and required additional hardware. The stability, upgrades, and maintenance are all excellent. You don't need to learn to code, but you need to know a lot to use F5. 

Alteon's price is excellent compared to other solutions. F5 costs around twice as much. We still have about three years left before this hardware reaches the end of its life. We're migrating to the cloud, and phasing some of this out, but it's nice that they've given us a long window to keep their hardware in place.

We also looked at A10. It was not financially sound, so we removed them from the table. Alteon was a better fit for our business size. 

I rate Radware Alteon a nine out of ten. Give Radware a try. Don't just pick F5. The learning curve shouldn't be an issue. If you can use F5, you can work on a Radware device. Someone who used a similar platform can use Radware with ease. It's fairly intuitive, so it should be a super easy transition if you already know how to use this type of device.

The vendor usually overloads the devices with a lot of functionality. The strength of this solution is the application delivery controller. The best functions are load-balancing services and multiple backend servers.

The SSL uploading feature is helpful, and every vendor has it. It terminates the full connections and takes care of all the power required for the backend servers to process the SSL load. Radware Alteon also makes our environment and web applications more scalable because the devices are half-sequence and specifically designed to handle web traffic and SSL web traffic.

These devices work as hypervisors on the cluster that we have on-premises. We can run virtual applications and delivery controllers inside them. We can also isolate resources and environments. In addition, Radware Alteon has a helpful scripting engine for automation called AppShape+.

I have worked with Big IP F5. It is a veteran solution that is more stable and has more resources. Big IP F5 has a virtual hub in the community with a lot of resources and already-made scripts that can be used for free. Radware Alteon has a community portal, but the community portal does not have a place to find scripts. It would be great if they could be transparent and deploy a community where their users can share the scripts.

We have been using this solution for almost 11 years. We have a cluster of two Radware 52808 devices. We are currently using version 32.2.12. Some devices are deployed on-premises, but we have a client running SIWA, a cloud web environment in Radware Alteon, so we deploy both. So it is on public and hardware cloud.

It is pretty stable, and we are happy with the solution. We had some problems in the past, but they have been resolved. In the past, we suffered some key performance bags. For example, there was a memory leak that persisted during firmware releases. We had to reboot and failover the devices. Every Wednesday at 6:00 pm, we had failovers of the digital application delivery control from one device to another for about a year. The device had a problem where if you ran it for too long without rebooting, it generated a corrupt memory and crashed. The device stopped accepting new connections, and we couldn't see any issues in the logs. The technical support told us it could be a tricky memory leak back. When we started rebooting the devices periodically each week, we managed to resolve the situation. It took about a year, and multiple upgrades and versions before the vendor fixed the issue.

Our organization usually buys load balances and hand-held devices oversized. We have not had any problem with scalability, and none of the devices fall short of our expectations. In addition, the devices are usually more powerful than the license they sell you. If there are problems with scalability, we can upgrade our license to a superior one.

We work with public institutions and have tens of thousands of potential users because we use Radware Alteon in public administration and digital offices. In Spain, the public administration sector is our biggest client.

They have good support, and we have used them for years.

We have used Big IP F5 for many years.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. It was not straightforward because we needed to set it up. Radware Alteon has a specific syntax requiring navigation of all menus and venues. 

Deployment depends on the area and configuration that needs to be applied. With setup experience, deployment of Radware Alteon could be reasonably fast. The initial deployment was done in-house. But now, connecting to a third-party coworker in the data center is easy. We can rack the device in the data center and plug the cables into a laptop that can plug into the Radware Alteon. The user can connect to a smartphone data plan and easily configure the device remotely. We need just two people for maintenance.

I believe there is a return on investment. Therefore, the solution is worth buying, and if you don't buy a load balancer, it is difficult because you will need more backend servers.

I do not have specific details about the costs. There is a licensing fee, and they have an SSL transaction license and others. They have two or three licenses that you pay based on the volume.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. Of recent, we tend to lean towards using cloud. This is because the on-premises devices are less common and are losing presence in my company's services. Regarding advice to others, I would recommend they upgrade the device before entering the production stage to reduce the bags.

The solution is basically used for load balancing. We do build for load balancing as well. We have several load balancers in the physical and cloud space. We started using it for GTM and also use it for some iRules scripting and to modify the SDP draft.

It was way cheaper than F5, so that was the reason to move from F5 to Radware. In terms of value for money, maybe it's better. F5 is very good. However, it was really expensive. This solution is also quite good, yet costs much less.

It's quite a nice solution. It's like F5. They are very good products and are very easy to use. They're very powerful, you can do a lot of things with the scripting, and also even in the interface and the graphic interface, you can configure other things without going to the scripting, to the rules.

The initial setup is easy and it was quick to deploy.

The solution has been very stable.

Maybe there are a couple of things that didn't work very well. You kind of have the same build and different build for load balancers. It can create some issues. We faced issues where we needed to have some kind of the same balance in different environments. That happened with F5. However, in Radware, you can do it when we move to production and we need to change the balance there. Different environments should be able to have some balance to be completely isolated. That's something that they could really improve to make it really, really isolated.

We’d like the solution to include more security features in the standard license.

We just acquired Radware in the last few months. IT’s been about eight months.

The solution is stable. In the last eight months since we migrated, we’ve had no big issues. Everything is working fine. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn’t crash or freeze.

The scalability is about licensing. You require more bandwidth and more throughput. To scale, it’s about acquiring more licensing. That’s about it.

For example, if you have a license of 30GBs of traffic and may need to support up to maybe 80GBs. You need to increase the license. You can kind of use it on demand, however. If you can change the license every three years, and you can see that your throughput is going to increase a lot, you can scale up.

We have about ten people on the solution currently. We do have plans to potentially increase usage in the future.

Technical support was okay. We opened a couple of tickets, it was okay. They were fast and they fixed the issues.

Positive

We just migrated to Radware from F5 APM. It’s quite new. It's really, really powerful. However, they are very good load balancers.

The setup is relatively straightforward. To do clustering is very easy. It's way easier than F5, I would say.

The deployment was quite fast. The problem was that migrating from F5 took a lot because we had to add the Windows in place and handle the service impact. That said, deploying is fast. If you are in the integration field and you don't have to migrate, it's pretty fast.

How many people you need to maintain the solution depends on the size. However, you might need four or five people.

There was a mix of personnel helping with the setup. I was doing it mostly myself. However, I had the help of professional services from Radware.

For the amount of traffic that we use, it's as good as F5 and way cheaper.

The pricing is much more reasonable than, for example, F5, our old solution.

I’m not sure how much the solution costs. However, my understanding is that it is moderately priced. I’d rate it a three out of five in terms of affordability. It’s not cheaper. However, it is less expensive than F5.

We checked in with Citrix as well. It was also good. In the end, we went to Radware.

We’re just a customer.

We’re using one of the most recent versions of the solution.

It's a very good product, however, if it would work for your company would depend on your needs. It depends on the amount of traffic.

I’d rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use it to load balance all of our applications within our data center and our EDI solutions.

Alteon makes it easier and quicker to spin up services when other departments come to us to deploy applications.

And its analytics have helped us save time, at least an hour or two in a typical scenario, when it comes to troubleshooting.

The most valuable aspect is the ability to customize the types of load-balancing scenarios needed for customized applications. Some of the load balancers on the market today are strictly out-of-hand load balancers for SSL or HTTP. Radware Alteon is most useful for customizing in-house applications based on ports and protocols.

Another great feature is integrated application protection. There are many features you can activate. Some of them are add-ons, such as WAF protection, DDoS, rate-limiting, and connections-per-second per application.

We also use Radware where we do all the programming.

The solution could be more open to additional third-party add-ons being integrated into it.

I've been using Radware Alteon for approximately 15 years.

The stability is almost flawless. Since we've had Radware products, we've had maybe two or three bugs. That makes it pretty darn stable.

Especially if you go with the virtual GEL license, it's very highly scalable.

One of their bright spots is that they have a great TAC for the product.

Positive

We did use another solution, but it was also from Radware. It was called AppDirector, before they acquired the Alteon technology. We switched because that was the path on which Radware was directing all of its customers. They combined the Nortel Alteon code with the AppDirector code and created the new solution with the new load balancers.

The initial setup was straightforward. The product documentation was the best piece.

We received virtual training from Radware on Alteon and it took about five days for our technical team to become familiar with it. The learning curve is probably one of the biggest benefits. If you're familiar with basic networking, it shouldn't be a big learning curve at all.

And it doesn't require any maintenance other than regular software upgrades as they come out. Compared to a competitor, maintenance with Radware is 50 percent cheaper.

We worked directly with a Radware engineer for our deployment. Our experience with them was great.

We have projected seeing a return on investment, but we haven't decommissioned our hardware load balancers yet. Our plan is to decommission all the hardware-based load balancers and go strictly to the virtual load balancers using the Global Elastic License for deployment and implementation.

We have seen time-to-value using Alteon in that we no longer have to deploy a physical load balancer in the data center and pay somebody to go rack and stack it. We can virtually spin it up in 30 minutes in a VMware environment. The time-to-value was immediate.

The pricing is better than the competition. It is getting more pricey as the years go on, as more people are migrating to it, and as the technology gets better. But the pricing is competitive with, or cheaper than, the other solutions out there.

We don't use the GEL (Global Elastic License yet, but we will be moving to it soon.

I evaluated F5. One of the biggest issues with that solution was cost. Radware was much cheaper and much easier, from what we saw, to implement into our type of data center environment.

My advice would be to really look at all the customized options that come with the product, as compared to its competitors. And take into account that their support model is significantly better than the competitors' support models.

We use Alteon Radware to balance web page services hosted on real and virtual servers, these government portals must be available 100% of the time and must be accessible from the internet and intranet. In addition to the fact that we can add an extra layer of security (due to the use of virtual IP address and proxy IP address) When there is an impact on any of the servers, we receive an alert notification and we can attend to the impact on that server, for the end-user, this is indistinct since the service is not affected.

We have improved the user experience by having services available all the time, in addition to the fact that with this solution it is easier to manage from a graphical interface that is useful and intuitive, as an administrator it is important to have a clear and complete vision of the services that we operate. Simple troubleshooting tools have helped us solve problems faster and problems are more complex so analysis is complex so we asked for Radware support. This has helped us to identify exactly where the problems are in the network, correct faults, and continuous improvement.

The simple and well-documented configuration allows us to be able to implement new balancing services at the request of the user with the same conditions and good service that they expect. We can also make changes to services that are already running, as I mentioned before, the graphical interface is very intuitive and you can almost always make the most common changes quickly.

Radware has been characterized by being extremely robust. This gives us the confidence to offer our users a continuous service.

We recently had a problem with the table's Obsolete ARP which was observed by the support team. It would be good to diagnose and solve this problem with a patch since it is not documented that it will be solved in later updates. The implementation of this service has been expanding to more of our clients, it is rare that we need to contact Radware support and even more rarely a call in real-time but we have found few technicians who give us support in Spanish, we could attend to the problems much faster if language barriers weren't an issue.

I used the solution two years ago.

The solution is extremely robust.

It is highly scalable.

99% of the time they have given us fast and efficient support.

Positive

Manual balancing tools and changes were made as a user might experience outages.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is well documented and we are free to do it via GUI or CLI.

We implemented this through an internal team, which is trained to do so thanks to the training tools provided by Radware.

We can offer automation in case of impact, which translates into time savings. I do not have the exact information of the ROI in terms of cash

The licensing processes are easy and the costs are acceptable. We use permanent licenses and we have not had any problems.

We did not evaluate other options. 

They could improve the solution update processes to make it easier and faster.

We use it as a load balancer.

It gives our application more resiliency by providing redundancy so that if one server fails, another one can take over and service the website.

And when troubleshooting, Alteon’s analytics have helped me save about half the time it would take me otherwise.

I like the web GUI. It's very intuitive and easy to use.

The reverse proxy piece is a little bit complicated. If the reverse proxy were easier to implement, that would help.

I have been using Radware Alteon for seven years.

It's very stable. It hasn't crashed on me at all.

It's scalable. We can purchase more licenses to accommodate more throughput.

We have it deployed across multiple locations and we have about 20,000 end-users.

Their tech support is very knowledgeable. I've always liked working with the Radware engineering team. They know their stuff.

Positive

We used AppDirectors, which is also from Radware. We switched because AppDirector was old and was end-of-support.

The deployment was pretty straightforward.

In terms of maintenance, every year we try to upgrade the code on the Alteon, but that's about it. It has reduced my maintenance overhead. It's a very low-maintenance system.

I did the whole deployment, along with my boss and one of my colleagues, and we used professional services from Radware. We received training, which was bundled with the purchase.

We have definitely seen return on our investment. It keeps our business more resilient and with higher availability.

The value in it also comes from the fact that how you manage it, and how you create and do things, is a lot easier. It's also more stable.

I needed a couple of months to get familiarized with it.

I'm content with Alteon's pricing.

The licensing is a little bit complicated because it's based on how much bandwidth you want to use, what the throughput is. Instead of having a throughput limit, it just allows whatever the bandwidth is and bases the licensing on vADCs (virtual application delivery controllers) only. That makes it a little bit complicated.

We did a PoC of F5. We chose Alteon based on cost and ease of use. F5 was twice the cost of Alteon at the time, although that was seven years ago.

Radware is not as well known as F5, so maybe the name is a little bit more obscure. That might be a little bit concerning for some people, but it wasn't for me.

You need to understand how to do low balancing and what it does. And you need to think about what types of features you are looking to get out of a product, such as SSL offloading.

I also use Radware's APSolute Vision, which enables me to manage all my devices—that's the best for me—as well as DefensePro.

We use Radware Alteon for data protection and security compliance.

Radware Alteon's integrated application protection is a good choice. It provides better protection for our web applications by delaying access to the interface and limiting access to specific web applications. This centralized and limited access makes it easier to manage our web applications, even if we have multiple users or customers. We have also provided suggestions for a release that includes the customer's recommended modifications and edits. This release is sufficient for cloud-based applications.

Radware Alteon's out-of-the-box integration feature is good.

The automation script libraries for each orchestrator are of good quality. Our team can apply the updates and configure them.

Radware Alteon has improved our organization by providing an interface for connecting 10 Gigabit Ethernet transceivers. This allowed us to increase our network bandwidth and improve the performance of our applications.

Radware Alteon Analytics saved us around 15 percent of the time troubleshooting. The dashboard provides a helpful overview of active alerts and warnings, and we can easily investigate and add new ones as needed. This has made it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly.

The UI is user-friendly. 

The cloud features are valuable.

The interface implementation can be improved. If any features of the current version need to be upgraded, such as those related to net flow, we need to reboot the system properly. We also need to be able to upgrade any Radware updates related to the version.

I have been using Radware Alteon for one and a half years.

Radware Alteon is a stable solution.

Radware Alteon is scalable. The solution is deployed in multiple mobile locations with over 1,000 users.

Radware Alteon's technical support is excellent.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment took two days and two people to complete. We received training from the Radware team.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The cost of Radware Alteon is mid-ranged.

The GEL licensing is flexible. The GEL license has helped save us around 25 percent.

I give Radware Alteon a ten out of ten.

We have seen time to value especially around the data security and compliance of Radware Alteon. We saw time to value after one and a half weeks of implementing Radware Alteon.

Radware Alteon is a scalable and available application delivery controller that can be used by organizations of all sizes. It offers a wide range of features, including automation, optimization, and migration from older to newer versions.

Radware Alteon is easy for organizations to switch to because it has training portals that provide all the necessary information, which minimizes the learning curve.

The maintenance is completed on a quarterly basis by the vendor.

I recommend Radware Alteon, but it is always a good idea to do a proof of concept before switching solutions.

My organization used the solution as a load balancer to balance the traffic on our application servers.

The GUI was a valuable feature. It was uncomplicated and easy to use.

The service could be improved by better customer support. 

They could also introduce much-needed cybersecurity as well as governance and tax reporting features.

I used the solution for almost four years.

The solution was stable.

The product is scalable. The functionality worked well. One issue was insufficient bandwidth to handle all the traffic, which likely impacted our timing. 

When we approached customer service and support with configuration-related issues and multiple cases of bugs in the Radware Alteon software, the response was slow, and there was no resolution. 

Neutral

I never used any other load balancer or ADC before. I've only worked with Radware Alteon.

From 2010 to 2018, when I was working, they had Alteon, which they implemented in 2000 when implementation was more complex.

I have no idea about the price, but the organization I was working for was always looking for economical products. So I would assume the price was quite competitive.

I would definitely recommend Radware load balancer to organizations around the globe that don't have a huge budget.

I would give the product an overall rating of seven out of 10.

We had an average of around 1,500 users. They used the product on everything and on every application server they had.

Regarding maintenance, we didn't have a very big IT environment. Two guys were enough to load the configuration and deal with operational issues.

Our maintenance included conflict backup, which differed depending on the organization. We scheduled load balancer reports as required, usually monthly, occasionally bi-monthly, and sometimes after six months, depending on customer requirements.

Potential users should use the application before implementing it and understand the infrastructure. They need to know how they will use the load balancer, what features it has to load, and whether they can utilize it.