News & Events

A10 Networks Announces Unique and Wide Ranging Customer-driven Functionality for AX Series Application Delivery Controllers

Virtualization, Dynamic Traffic Management Features, DNSSEC Support and Ease-of-Use Enhancements Included without Additional Fees

SAN JOSE, CA, October 18, 2010 - A10 Networks™, the technology leader in Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), unveiled enhanced customer-driven capabilities with its new AX Series software release today. The entire AX Series family receives a broad range of significant feature enhancements, all without additional licensing fees. A10's AX Series is a new generation server load balancer with an innovative 64-bit shared-memory and multi-CPU Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS™) architecture that leaps the competition in performance, scalability, efficiency and flexibility.

"With our new release, we delivered the first milestone on our Cloud Computing and Virtualization Roadmap by offering customers a wide range of virtualization options with our AX Series," said Lee Chen, Founder and CEO for A10 Networks. "This major enhancement to our feature set demonstrates why A10 is the natural alternative to legacy solutions, offering customers more innovation and better value. A10 is not just the fastest growing application delivery vendor, we are one of the fastest growing companies in America, and we see our growth only accelerating as we deliver on customer requirements."

Key updates in the AX Series include:

• Virtualization Technologies Enabling Cloud Computing: Delivering on A10 Networks' Virtualization Roadmap to scale up performance and provide advanced multi-tenant configurations.
  
  
  • aVCS™ (Virtual Chassis System): Enables organizations to efficiently scale as they grow by linearly scaling to eight AX Series appliances in a virtual cluster, which is operated and managed as a single unified device. aVCS allows organizations to pay as they grow, resulting in a cost effective solution that allows organizations to pay for just the appliances they need. Functionality includes support for Layer 2/3 topologies, more efficient high availability, and cluster resizing for seamless capacity provisioning/de-provisioning with graceful upgrades/downgrades.
  • Layer 2/3 Virtualization Enhancements for AX Virtualization (AX multi-tenancy): Expanded capabilities within Application Delivery Partitions (ADPs) offer per partition granularity for Layer 2/3 network virtualization and hardware virtualization. Partitioned-based segmentation of an individual AX Series enables cost-effective production quality, and high performance multi-tenancy between applications and organizations.
  • SoftAX™ and AX-V: An upgraded beta version of SoftAX based on this release will be available for download.
• Dynamic Traffic Management and Protection: Ensuring the user experience under unexpected load or large scale attacks.
  
  
  • aFlow™: Enables predictable performance without outages during peak traffic conditions. Instead of dropping valid requests or having non-responsive servers in the event of peak traffic conditions, aFlow queues end-users' requests automatically. When the response time returns to an acceptable level, the AX device sends the queued requests to the servers.
  • Geo-location Based Connection Limiting per VIP: Provides the ability to mitigate DDoS attacks from specific countries or regions automatically. For example connections limits would be based on expected geographic traffic patterns, ensuring localized anomalous traffic such as botnet attacks are neutralized, while other regional traffic flows unhindered.
  • Selective DNS Caching: Monitors for an excessive number of DNS queries, and when detected automatically enables granular DNS caching polices, for example on a per domain basis. This allows the DNS server infrastructure to continue to perform and customer service levels to be maintained.
• DNSSEC Support: Coupled with A10's successful completion of testing at the VeriSign DNSSEC Interoperability Lab, the AX Series provides support for large (fragmented) DNS responses, ensuring automatic DNSSEC readiness.
  
  
• Ease-of-Use Enhancements:
  
  
  • Smart Templates for Rapid Enterprise Application Deployment: Easy-to-use templates for rapid deployment of enterprise solutions such as solutions from Microsoft (including SharePoint and Exchange), Oracle, Juniper VPNs and more.
  • Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) Simplified Configuration: Simplified GUI configuration coupled with automatic GSLB configuration synchronization to reduce complexity and management time needed for deployment and operation of each site.
  • Google Chrome 5.0 Browser Support for Web-based Management: In addition to existing support for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari.
• aFleX™ and aXAPI™ Enhancements: Multiple enhancements; examples include support for multiple aFleX policies on a single virtual port and aXAPI system configuration restore capabilities.
  
  
• Other Notable Enhancements: IS-IS routing support for IPv4 and IPv6; optional HTTP hardware compression module support on the AX 2500, AX 2600, and AX 3000; and IPv6 enhancements.

"Once a potential buyer test drives one of our vehicles, the rest is easy. I feel the same way about A10's AX Series of appliances - once you try them you'll be sold," said George Hamin, Director of eBusiness & Information Systems at Subaru Canada. "While we have been using the AX Series for a while, the enhancements to the AX Virtualization multi-tenancy feature will allow us to consolidate our two distinct environments; our Microsoft Exchange 2010 environment and our web environment to a single pair of appliances, with high availability. This is a smart choice for Subaru; the AX Series reduces the amount of Application Delivery Controllers in our network and saves us money in the process."

"WWE operates a real-time web voting system, which causes frequent and unpredictable 'flash crowds' during our wrestling events that result in peak traffic conditions," said Phillip James, Manager, Digital Media Operations at World Wrestling Entertainment. "The aFlow feature in A10's new AX Series software release will add another intelligent layer on top of the existing AX rate and limit controls to protect our servers from being overwhelmed, ensuring our viewers can continue to vote for their favorite wrestlers in real-time and uninterrupted."

"A10 is tapping the pulse of the customer and delivering unique cutting edge advanced ADC features such as aVCS, Layer 2/3 Virtualization and DNSSEC support in this release," said Dr. Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates and author of the Application Delivery Handbook. "It is notable that the new features are not just for the high end appliances, but the entire range of 64-bit AX Series appliances, which means A10 is raising the bar."

Availability
The AX Series enhancements are available for download in version 2.6 without additional charge and scheduled for release by end of this month.

Additional Resources
DNSSEC White Paper: http://www.a10networks.com/forms/register.WP-DNSSEC.php
Subaru Canada Case Study: http://www.a10networks.com/resources/casestudies-Subaru_Canada.php

About A10 Networks
A10 Networks was founded in Q4 2004 with a mission to provide innovative networking and security solutions. A10 Networks makes high-performance products that help organizations accelerate, optimize and secure their applications. A10 Networks is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan. For more information, visit http://www.a10networks.com

ACOS, aFleX, aXAPI, aVCS, Virtual Chassis, SoftAX, SmartFlow and aFlow are registered trademarks of A10 Networks.

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Contact:
Kelly LeBlanc
A10 Networks
408-325-8668
kleblanc@a10networks.com