What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
Buyer's Guide
Radware Alteon
May 2023
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For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Alteon for seven or eight years. My company was one of the first in North America to adopt the platform.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
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