AX SERIES: VIRTUALN

Web Application Delivery Demands

Networks are constantly changing in response to evolving Application Delivery needs. Bandwidth-greedy applications such as video on-demand and other multi-media application services need very high throughputs. Portals and online transactions need very high Layer 4/Layer 7 connections per second/transactions per second and very large session capacities. eCommerce sites require very high SSL performance. Application Delivery services require very high uptimes and fault tolerance.

Customers must fulfill all of these needs while at the same time reducing total cost of ownership and meeting tight power and space budgets. As the focal point for meeting all of these diverse demands, server load balancers are one of the most critical elements of application networking.

To fulfill these Application Delivery demands, customers up to now have had two choices:

1. Redundant chassis-based systems
2. Multiple pairs of redundant stackable load balancers

With redundant chassis-based systems, customers incur the cost of electricity, space and equipment today for tomorrow's bandwidth expansion. With multiple pairs of redundant stackable load balancers, there are significant management costs and challenges for increasing numbers of devices.

A10 Networks developed VirtualN – an innovative Web Application Delivery on demand solution – to address these issues.

VirtualN – Web Application Delivery Scaling on Demand

VirtualN is the industry's first solution to satisfy the demands of Web Application Delivery customers, by meeting growing performance and throughput requirements without requiring chassis-based systems or stackable load balancers.

With VirtualN, multiple AX Series devices act as a single Virtual Load Balancer. Customers can start with as few as two AX Series devices in a VirtualN (Virtual Load Balancer) configuration and add more devices as their application demands grow. A total of up to 8 AX's can be used in the VirtualN solution. With VirtualN, customers can provision a single Virtual IP across multiple devices, or provision multiple virtual IPs across multiple devices. The VirtualN devices automatically distribute the load among themselves to provide extremely high performance and resiliency.

VirtualN leverages the Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) architecture inherent in all A10 AX Series devices. ACOS makes AX Series the industry's first server load balancer platform that is tuned for modern multi-core CPU systems to realize the performance benefits of modern hardware architectures. With AX's new VirtualN capability combined with ACOS, customers no longer need to purchase large, expensive chassis-based systems or multiple pairs of high-end load balancers to meet increasing Web application scalability and availability needs.

Benefits

Total Performance Scalability:
All aspects of performance scale near-linearly with the addition of more AX devices. VirtualN scales throughput and performance for all applications.

• Layer 4: up to 4 million connections per second (CPS)
• Layer 4 Throughput: up to 68 Gigabits per second
• Layer 7: up to 8 million transactions per second (TPS)
• Layer 7 Throughput: up to 68 Gigabits per second
• SSL Acceleration: up to 400K TPS
• Ram Caching: up to 6.4 million TPS
• Ram Caching Throughput: up to 80 Gigabits per second

High Availability:
Extremely high availability is achieved by using two or more devices. If any VirtualN device fails or is offline for maintenance, the traffic will transfer seamlessly to the remaining devices.

• Support for All-Active(N), in which all devices are active for the same Virtual IP
• Support for All-Active(N+1), in which N devices are active and one is standby
• Support for session level failover to provide unprecedented application availability

Flexibility:
Customers have a great deal of flexibility in choosing topologies, networking modes and features.

• Support for one-armed and inline modes of operation
• Support for routed/bridged modes of operation
• Choice of NAT modes: direct server return (DSR), Dest-NAT, and Src-NAT
• Full choice of features: Layer 4, Layer 7, aRule scripting, SSL, compression, and more

Manageability:
With VirtualN, the AX devices can be managed as a single Virtual Load Balancer for all application management needs.

• Single Virtual Load Balancer to configure Layer 4/7 application features
• Single Virtual Load Balancer to operate and maintain Layer 4/7 application features
• Support for role-based management for the virtual load balancer
• Support for CLI/Web interface as well as XML API to manage the single Virtual Load Balancer

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership:
VirtualN provides the most cost effective “green” solution on the market. Each AX device is a 2U (2 rack-unit) device. This configuration provides:

• Best price/performance
• Best performance per watt
• Best performance per rack unit
• Best scalability, availability, flexibility and manageability
• Best investment protection

VirtualN Performance Chart

* Tolly Report, April 2008

Sample Application Diagram - Video Delivery with Network Address Translation (NAT)

4 AX 3200s Single Virtual IP (VIP) Multiple Video Servers Source Network Address Translation (NAT) Asymmetric Traffic Characteristics Incoming - up to 2G Outgoing - up to 32G