Radware Alteon Reviews

We use it for balancing all of our services and our servers.

It saves us a lot of work in terms of management since it has tasks already defined automatically. That enables us to better administer our services. It is very dynamic and easy to administer.

Another benefit of using Alteon is the support that Radware, as a company, provides. They are very fast and that is key because the availability of our exposed services is always very important to us.

We realized these benefits immediately, with highly available servers without service interruptions. We have two servers, which, thanks to the virtual services that Alteon has, can be quickly balanced. Our services are always up. The time-to-value was almost immediate. The high availability of services helps avoid losses and any instability that might result in intermittent services.

We have high availability for both our servers and services, thanks to the virtual service that Alteon manages. We have two Alteon teams internally, so if one data center suddenly has a problem, the other data center still functions. That means we have an immediate solution. When one is not there, the other immediately takes control.

We go to the analytics, to the graphs and to the logs, where we can identify problems and failures. We have it configured to send us notifications and alerts when a service is slow or does not respond for some time. With the alerts and the logs, we are able to further verify the graph of the services and their states of health. That helps us a lot to quickly find out if we have a problem and find solutions. We can save 80 percent of the time it used to take to investigate a case because it makes it much easier and simpler for us to find an issue.

The most valuable aspect of Alteon is the availability it provides for our services. The availability of services is very important for any company, and especially for us since we are a port with many internet-facing services.

In addition, the solution is very dynamic and easy to manage.

Another excellent feature is the integrated application protection. It is an excellent product with many features that serve to protect our company. The services we provide are of vital importance, so their availability and protection with Alteon are truly important.

It is a fairly complete service and it is difficult for me to think of what can be improved. A feature that I would like to see included in the next version might be better analysis when working with crypt issues. Right now, it is very manual; you load it into Alteon and it runs. It would be interesting to see a more dynamic process.

I have been using Radware Alteon for about six years.

Alteon is very stable. The equipment has been working for six years. We have a refresh scheduled and we have the new equipment here, but we have not yet made the change. Our old equipment continues to work perfectly. The change is being made because of the company's policy: every five years, all the equipment must be renewed.

It's a very scalable solution. We always have plans to increase usage.

Their technical support is an excellent service. They answer very quickly and you always have their support. Anytime we suddenly have an issue that we don't understand, we go to them and they provide excellent service and technical support. Depending on the urgency of the case, they call or write to you. We do not have any complaints.

This is our first load-balancing platform.

The deployment is private. We have the Alteon equipment onsite in two physical data centers.

The complexity of the deployment depends on how many and what types of services there are, but it was simple because of the accompaniment and support we had from Radware. Radware itself came in and installed the service; they gave us tutorials too, so it was very simple.

You need to consider what your services are and what you are going to exhibit. It is important to have a work plan. We divided our implementation into three days. On the first day, equipment was installed, on the second day it was configured, and the third day was a day of monitoring.

Becoming familiar with Alteon was very easy. We did the training for a week, but we quickly became familiar with the platform. If you're thinking about Alteon but concerned about the learning curve, Alteon is very dynamic and easy to learn. In addition, Radware's team does not leave you alone. Their technical team is always there to support you on any questions you may have.

Soon we will renew our equipment; we have already bought and received it. And we will go through the same process again, installing, configuring, and monitoring on the third day. It is very fast.

There is no maintenance. The platform works pretty well on its own. It has reduced our maintenance overhead by just about 100 percent because we do not have maintenance related to Alteon.

The people from Radware were the ones who implemented it. On our side, there were two people handling the implementation, the administrator and an analyst.

On the financial side, my understanding is that there has been a return on investment. If we did not have Alteon for service availability, our services could be affected, and, in the end, that would create financial issues.

In the technical area, the return on investment is the availability of our services. It is very important that our availability is optimal for both our internal and external clients. That is the greatest return on investment.

We have a three-year contract with Radware. It is beneficial to have a longer-term contract because you can obtain more discounts. It seems to be a much cheaper alternative.

We use their Gel Elastic License (GEL). It allows us to integrate what we need. With this licensing model, we have a lower cost for using Alteon in our company. Radware does not force us to use everything but only what we really need for our operations. That's why it is quite good. We have saved about 15 percent using the Gel Elastic License, which is actually quite a lot.

We did not evaluate many products since the provider that advises us on cybersecurity issues was the one who recommended that we choose Radware. We saw the benefits and it was chosen. We did not do much comparison with other solutions because we felt very confident in our provider's reasoning. Our provider, E-Global, who suggested Radware to us, gave us complete confidence in Radware.

Don't think about it too much. It's an excellent solution and it's quite reliable.

The most important lesson I have learned by using Alteon is that, thanks to these certified solutions, we can have our services available and we are able to maintain our good name as a company and our reputation in the market.

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.

Alteon is used in our environment for the application traffic from the customers. The traffic is coming from outside the network. It then comes to the firewall. From the firewall, it goes to the load balancer which sends the traffic to different application servers in a distributed environment.

There is no lack of connectivity. The traffic is going smoothly. The handshake is happening. SSL offloading is happening perfectly on the device, and it is going to the application server. The response is being sent to the customers within milliseconds. We have done a hardware refresh. Earlier, we were using the 6 GB memory box, and we are now using a 12 GB memory box with the same features.

The downtime is minimal. The product is robust, and there are no issues that we have faced. We are running N-1 releases or the latest releases. The support from Radware is fantastic.

The downtime is very little. We have not faced any issues. Because we are using it in a cluster environment, we have redundancy built in there, so we do not face any issues.

Alteon’s analytics have saved us time when troubleshooting. We understand the traffic coming from various customers and analyze it. It has saved about 15% to 20% of our time.

SSL offloading feature is one of the most important features. Traffic distribution is also done very well by Radware.

Radware should work on the vulnerabilities part. There are third-party security solutions that do the security vulnerability assessment (VA). The assessment part needs to be worked on and improved. There should be more solutions. If any issue comes up and if any vulnerability is reported, the Radware team should do an R&D on that and work on that. They should give the solution to the customer.

Everything else is perfect. We are not facing any issues with the product.

We have been using Alteon in our environment for almost seven to eight years. We have done a hardware refresh. Earlier, we were using the 5208 XL model, and now, we are using the 5208S model.

The stability of the box is a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. There is no problem. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

It is being used at multiple locations. About three to four people are working with Alteon, but for the application, we have a big team. Our customers are enterprises.

Their technical support from India is very good. However, when it is nighttime in India, it is a bit challenging because their support comes from outside India, most probably Israel. Sometimes, we face a challenge when the support is given by the team out of India. It takes time. Due to the language issues, it takes time for them to understand the issue, so the time to resolve the issue or work on an issue increases.

Positive

We were previously using the F5 load balancer, and then we switched to Alteon. Alteon is working fine for us, and we have not faced any issues with it.

We switched because of the features and pricing. Pricing plays the most important role in procurement. Alteon's pricing is competitive, and that is why we have moved on from F5 to Alteon. F5 is also not as flexible as Alteon.

It is an on-prem solution. Its deployment was straightforward. It was not complex.

We were able to migrate from old devices to new devices in minutes. We just copied the configuration from the old box and replicated it to the new box. It does not take much time. The releases and the patches that we deploy are also very efficient.

Replicating to a box took 20 to 30 minutes. Putting the operating system and replicating the configuration does not take more than 30 minutes.

It requires maintenance. When a new patch comes, we implement it. We plan a downtime and implement it. Even though we have a redundant node, we take downtime to be on the safer side. 

The solution has a minimum downtime, and the maintenance window is also short. It is not big.

We did not receive training from Radware on how to use Alteon. We are doing it by ourselves. It is an on-the-job kind of training.

Overall, two to three people were involved.

It is difficult to calculate the ROI because the Alteon load balancer is one part of the investment. There is the whole network and server infrastructure. We have not calculated the ROI, but it plays a very key role. The traffic is seamlessly distributed to the application servers. The application processes it and gives a response.

It is cost-efficient. That is why we have gone with Alteon. As a product, it is efficient and robust. We have not faced any issues with the device.

I would recommend Radware Alteon because it is a very smooth solution. Someone who wants to deploy an application load balancer in their environment can go for this box without any thoughts or concerns. The box is very scalable. It is a very smooth system. It handles the traffic very comfortably. You will not face any issues with the box.

Our application is an in-house application. It does not go over the Internet. We do not have any cloud connectivity. We also do not have out-of-the-box application integrations in our environment. Alteon is supporting the SNMPv3 standard for sending the SNMP trap to the outside box. That is the only integration we have done, and it is working fine. We have not integrated with OpenShift, Ansible, etc.

I would rate Radware Alteon a nine out of ten. There are only two areas of improvement. The vulnerability part needs improvement and the support given at night time from outside the country needs improvement. It takes longer to get an issue resolved with the support team located out of India.

We are a data center company, and we need load balancers at our end so that the load is balanced. These are network load balancers, and they are helping us to balance the overall traffic at our end. Because we are a data center company, we host a lot of customers. We host more than 800 customers in our data center, and that itself is a big use case. Earlier, we were using it only in one data center, but now, we are using it in two data centers, so we have two load balancers, one at each site, and we are about to configure global load balancing between both of them.

We are a data center company, and we used to see a lot of traffic management issues. Since the implementation of Alteon two and a half years ago, we have been able to load balance the entire traffic that is coming in. It gives our customers good performance. Customers are happy with the traffic management and the load balancing feature. The customers are more satisfied now than before it was implemented.

The integrated applicant protection is extremely good. Integration with third-party applications is easy in the case of Radware Alteon. This is a critical feature, and Radware has made it very simple.

We have also used the out-of-the-box integration feature, and we have also customized some integration with the help of our Radware partner. We have integrated with vRA/vRO. Ansible is going to be used along with my OpenStack in the new load balancer that we have attached.

The automation script libraries for each orchestrator are good. That is the reason the integration is simplified. If these automation scripts were complicated, integration would have been difficult, but because of these automation scripts, integration has become so easy, robust, and simple, and we are able to integrate third-party applications within a very short period of time.

The best part is that we are able to manage it easily. It is easy to manage and easy to integrate with third-party applications. It is also easy in terms of overall support. The installation itself was very easy. These are the most likable features about Radware load balancers.

Their support can be better. The Radware management is very proactive. We can connect to anybody in Radware Management in India. We can even connect with the MD of Radware India. However, their lower level staff should be more proactive towards the customers.

In terms of features, we have had issues with SSL in version 5208, and we asked them to improve it on the SSL front. They have improved the new one. Currently, we are using 6024. In this version, SSL integration and the integration layer are a lot more simplified and secure. This was missing in the earlier version, but in the new version, it is simplified and resolved. In the earlier version, firmware upgrades also used to take slightly more time, whereas, in the new version, there are no issues at all.

We have been using Radware Alteon for almost two and a half years.

It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten. It can be better.

Positive

We did not use anything before Alteon. We were without a load balancer when we started the operation. It was becoming very difficult to manage or load balance the traffic. Since we implemented it, life has become simple for us.

It is a hybrid model. In the first implementation, we did not face many issues. There were some traffic issues related to utilization, but they got resolved. We are now implementing the second one, and we are also going to implement global load balancing. Overall, things are much simpler now. They have improved its simplicity.

Its maintenance includes only firmware upgrades and nothing else. We do not see any maintenance issues.

We have a Radware partner. This partner is called RAH Infotech. They do the implementation along with our team. There were two people from the partner side and four of our team members. There were six people.

We did not receive training from Radware on how to use Alteon. It is also not required. It is very simple. We did not need any training. When our partner implemented it, we learned it along with that.

The return on investment is directly proportional to the improved satisfaction of the customer. Earlier, the customers were not satisfied, whereas now, customers are extremely satisfied because their traffic is balanced. They know that they are getting the best performance. The throughput is the best. When the customers are satisfied, the ROI of the system is already achieved.

We could see its value in two months from the date of purchase. It took almost three weeks to implement. After that, in two to three weeks, we started observing. We started seeing the value from eight weeks onwards.

It is the best in the industry. It was better than the competition, and that is what made us go ahead with them. In any product, we look for features and functionalities, product support, management connection, and pricing.

We looked at F5, Citrix, and Array solutions. We went for Alteon for four reasons. I have 30 years of experience, and at least for the last 15 years, a load balancer meant only Radware. We never heard about other products, so we were aware of Radware load balancers. This was the first reason. 

The second reason was the management connection. If you have a management connection at the topmost level, things become much easier, so the product is good, and the management connection is there. We have signed for the highest level of support from them.

Another important factor was the market buzzword. People believe that in the CISO platform category, Radware is among the best products in the market today.

The cost was another factor. We were able to get the best rate from them as compared to other competitors.

It is the best in the market. It is simple. It is not complex, and pricing is also very competitive, so you can go ahead with it.

Overall, I would rate Radware Alteon an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement.

We have deployed Alteon to our cluster to provide load balancing of the applications. We also utilize the security functionality, which is a WAF on top of the load balancing.

The solution has added a secure layer in front of the servers, protecting them from malicious actors, especially the actors who are targeting our application.

And the analytics have definitely helped save time, about 20 to 25 percent, when troubleshooting, due to the breadth of monitoring and the visibility that the solution offers.

The best features are the

• security through the web application firewall
• functionality that the solution offers, being a load balancer with the security functionality on top of it
• ease of administration.

The integrated application protection is very good.

Pretty much every feature is as promised.

I would like to see future enhancements in security, specifically in threat protection. That would definitely make it a 10 out of 10.

We've been using Radware Alteon for less than a year.

It's pretty stable.

It is scalable. We use it to protect our mail application, so Alteon is used by approximately 1,000 users.

The customer support is an area that can be enhanced, in terms of response time.

Neutral

We had a different solution before but not one specifically like Alteon. For load balancing we used different solutions from Citrix and Barracuda.

The integrated WAF in Alteon is much easier to administer as compared to the other solutions. That aspect is 50 percent better than those solutions.

The initial deployment was pretty straightforward. It took a few weeks and the fine-tuning, as per the customer's requirements, took one or two months.

We have it in one location but in multiple departments. Alteon is sitting in front of the server farm and the users in different departments are accessing these servers. Alteon acts as a security layer before the traffic gets passed to the actual servers.

Maintenance is required, of course, and we have two people involved in that process. But Alteon has helped to reduce our maintenance overhead by about 20 percent.

It's too early for us to see ROI. Still, we have absolutely seen time to value with Alteon. The moment the solution was implemented, we started observing the logs, which helped us fine-tune the policies. The visibility decreased the time to value helping us tweak the policies and get the boxes ready for production.

The solution is cost-efficient.

I would recommend Alteon and I would also recommend a proof of concept because every customer's environment is different. But it can definitely add value, considering the feature pack the solution provides with security and WAF, especially on top of the load balancing.

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.

I am using Radware Alteon as a load balancer. It's used to simplify balancing connections between servers for a larger application in my organization. This allows me to manipulate many applications to better serve my organization.

It provides us with logs about all of our application's transactions, enabling us to trace problems. The analytics help us pinpoint the root cause of issues like TLS problems and trace previously unanswered requests, enabling solutions with given analytics abilities.

The simplicity of the GUI is what I like the most about Radware Alteon. It provides logs about all of our application's transactions, which allows us to trace problems and identify issues such as TLS problems. The analytics help us pinpoint the root cause of various issues, enabling solutions with given analytics abilities.

I know they are working on it, however, I would like to see an improved community presence, similar to the one for their main competitor, F5. There are forums with questions and answers from customers, which is currently lacking for Alteon. More materials are difficult to find in the network, so increasing community and documentation would be beneficial.

I've been using Radware Alteon for several years.

The stability of the solution is good. There have been no notable issues related to downtime or bugs.

I rate the scalability of the product at a seven.

The technical support deserves an eight out of ten. Their customer service is quite reliable.

Positive

The initial setup was easy and not so complex. It took a couple of days with three people involved.

The implementation was handled by our internal team with three individuals involved.

I would recommend Radware Alteon. If someone wants an effective product with good capabilities, they should consider this solution. 

I rate the product eight out of ten.