RE: Experiences with A10 AX series Load Balancers?

["Welch, Bryan" <Bryan.Welch () arrisi com>]

Yes, agreed.  I think the Netscaler falls into the category of the Cisco in this respect <ducks>.  Seems the F5 gear is 
the 1000lb gorilla in this category and for the most part we have no reason to look anywhere else other than doing our 
own due diligence with respect to the other vendor offerings in this space.



Regards,

Bryan

From: packetmonger () gmail com [mailto:packetmonger () gmail com] On Behalf Of Darren Bolding
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 6:46 PM
To: Justin Horstman
Cc: Welch, Bryan; nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Experiences with A10 AX series Load Balancers?

Very interesting to see about A10's performance- I've heard mixed things about them.

Just an FYI, the newer F5 platforms don't utilize the ASIC's- the performance curve of general-purpose CPU's has once 
again eclipsed what can be done with specialized silicon without aggressive (and expensive) revision cycles.  The 
ASIC's also could only be used in simpler virtual server configurations and with certain subsets of iRules.

That said, nothing else I'm aware of provides the functionality of iRules.  I've used netscalers only a relatively 
small amount- and they are nice- particularly if your requirements are within their feature set- but my experience has 
been that things I take for granted using an iRule are seriously painful to implement on a netscaler.

--D

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Justin Horstman <jhorstman () adknowledge com<mailto:jhorstman () adknowledge com>> 
wrote:
The boxes do alright at low load levels. They do not have an asic tech like the F5s so choke on large amounts of 
traffic. Management is a bit immature and you will find yourself having to use the CLI and the Gui to accomplish most 
advanced tasks.

When we put them head to head A10 AX3200 vs F5 6400 ltm (note: 6400 was what we were looking to replace)

Test:
1000 concurrent users from Gomez's Networks Loadtesting platform hitting as fast as the requests would close, going 
through our standard vip config on the f5, and the A10 engineering teams 3 best efforts  to beat that config that 
balanced between two Identical Dell 1950 servers serving  a php page that responded with a random number (to avoid 
caching). The 6400 we used was in production at the time, and was older so we were expecting to get blown away, see the 
results here:

F5 - Peaked 160k completed transactions a minute sustained for 10 minutes, 0 errors, 112ms average transaction response 
time
A10 - Held 60k completed transactions a minute sustained for 10 minutes, 0 errors, 360ms average transaction response 
time

If anyone is interested in the graphs I think I can still pull them out of gomez. Though notable that this was all done 
a year ago, so things might be different now.

~J


-----Original Message-----
From: Welch, Bryan [mailto:Bryan.Welch () arrisi com<mailto:Bryan.Welch () arrisi com>]
Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 8:35 PM
To: nanog () nanog org<mailto:nanog () nanog org>
Subject: Experiences with A10 AX series Load Balancers?

Does anyone have any experiences good/bad/indifferent with this company and their products?  They claim 2x the 
performance at ½ the cost and am a bit leery as you can imagine.

We are looking to replace our aging F5 BigIP LTM's and will be evaluating these along with the Netscaler and new 
generation F5 boxes.




Regards,

Bryan




--
--  Darren Bolding                  --
--  darren () bolding org<mailto:darren () bolding org>           --