Case Studies

Bentley University, located in Waltham, MA, is one of the nation's leading business schools, with a focus on preparing business leaders with deep technical skills, a broad global perspective and high ethical standards. Students interested in business professions choose from a wide range of programs that address all functional areas including accountancy, finance, marketing, management and liberal arts - all anchored in technology.

Leading by example, Bentley University relies on state-of-the-art technology to assist its students and faculty with research, communication and other learning management systems. Bentley deployed an Oracle Web Portal so that students and faculty have access to all applications at anytime, and anywhere.

To load balance its data center servers that power its enterprise-wide applications, Bentley previously utilized F5's BIG-IP appliances in its data center. However, when the IT department established an initiative to make the Oracle Web Portal more responsive, the project became expensive. Bentley wanted to add Web Caching and SSL Off-load features to the BIG-IPs to alleviate the load on the servers, but F5 required expensive licenses for these features. So the University evaluated alternative solutions from A10, Citrix (NetScaler) and Zeus, finally selecting A10's AX Series Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).
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Box.net provides lightweight, secure and scalable online collaboration services with over two million users. To keep its LAMP stack running, a cost-effective, high performance server load balancer platform was required. Box.net chose two AX 2100 server load balancers in a High Availability (HA) pair...
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CGA Ontario represents more than 19,000 CGAs and 9,000 students. With internal and external users accessing enterprise applications such as SharePoint, Exchange and Blackboard, CGA required a high-performance server load balancer platform, at an affordable price.

Through a Web search for high-performance server load balancers, CGA Ontario discovered several news articles on A10's AX Series, highlighting twice the performance at half the price of comparable solutions. The extreme value proposition removed other solutions from consideration. CGA Ontario contacted A10, set up the install, noticed the performance improvements immediately and purchased the AX Series...
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Club One is an award-winning fitness and wellness provider, with fitness centers across California and wellness programs throughout the United States and Canada. With streaming video and other critical applications to fitness center and partner locations, Club One required a flexible load balancer for Web Application Delivery.

After evaluating and researching solutions, and upon the recommendation of Silicon Valley based reseller VARiable Path, Club One chose three AX 2000 next-generation server load balancers. Two AXs are deployed in the data center in a High Availability (HA) pair configuration. One AX is deployed at the corporate office for Disaster Recovery (DR)...
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Code Ready Solutions is a team of technology professionals comprised of consultants, researchers, programmers, graphic designers, animators, system engineers, quality assurance teams, project managers and business analysts who in collaboration engineer technology solutions for companies and organizations across the globe.

Code Ready maintains a server farm to conduct business and often runs multiple Websites on the same server with the same IP address. To ensure its servers are always performing and available, Code Ready required a high-performance server load balancing solution. Upon the recommendation of Value Added Reseller (VAR) DataLink Associates Corp., Code Ready selected A10's AX Series server load balancers due to essential fl exibility gained by aFleX technology and the industry leading price/performance...
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CRC Health Group is the largest provider of specialized behavioral health care services in the U.S., treating more than 30,000 patients each day. CRC has 145 facilities with staff located across the U.S.

CRC provides its staff with Microsoft Outlook Web Access so that its users can access email anywhere and anytime when they are off-site, or on site but not at their own terminal. To ensure that Outlook Web Access is always available and responsive, CRC deployed A10's AX Series server load balancers to balance the load...
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Earth Class Mail required a new server load balancer solution to load-balance the Web servers that run the business-critical AJAX-powered Web mail applications. The AJAX Web applications are high-volume with millions of XML formatted messages passed daily.

Given the requirement for privacy and protection of personal information in its online postal-mail service, Earth Class Mail needed a load balancer that can encrypt and re-encrypt SSL on the backend. Because its previous load balancer could not perform the SSL encryption/re-encryption, Earth Class Mail compared competitors' products and selected A10's AX Series server load balancers. The SSL functionality combined with the industry-leading price/performance and support were key competitive differentiators for the AX Series...
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FFF Enterprises delivers the nation's first online vaccine portal, MyFluVaccine. A10's AX Series provides FFF Enterprises with a highperformance server load balancing platform to ensure MyFluVaccine is always performing and available.

FFF Enterprises selected A10's AX 2100 Advanced Traffic Manager as it delivers all the required features to ensure the MyFluVaccine(TM) portal performs as desired, especially during peak usage conditions. The key AX Series features that FFF Enterprises leverages include Layer 4-7 server load balancing, SSL acceleration/offload, application persistence and aFleX for advanced scripting...
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Florence County provides information and applications to 3 million viewers a month. To optimize and accelerate its virtualized server clusters, a cost-effective, fast and very feature rich server load balancer platform was essential. Florence County chose two AX 2100s in a High Availability (HA) pair. The compelling reasons for choosing A10's AX Series resulted from Application Delivery requirements and core server load balancing functionality...
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Gamania Digital Equipment, headquartered in Taiwan with 650 employees, is a leading online game provider, which develops, publishes and co-publishes on-line games. Founded in 1995, Gamania has grown from a handful of gaming enthusiasts to a multinational organization that continuously delivers a first-class online gaming experience to many thousand users daily.

For the past five years, Gamania has leveraged application delivery controllers (ADCs) to enhance its online Web gaming application services. This includes load balancing and application acceleration for value-added services, such as downloading patch files and access to online games. In 2008, Gamania expanded its operations to deliver increased services to its users, which required more ADCs to be added to its continuously growing network.

For its datacenter and operation expansion project, Gamania had several options for the new ADCs. The first was to purchase additional BIG-IP load balancers from F5, its incumbent provider. The second was to evaluate alternatives to see if there are better solutions in the industry. For this option, Gamania evaluated Citrix's NetScaler and A10's AX Series. During the proof of concept (PoC) period, A10's AX Series new-generation ADCs demonstrated superb performance, flexibility and scalability, which outshined competitors. As a result, Gamania selected AX Series for its expansion project...
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Game Flier is a leading online gaming provider in Taiwan. A10's AX Series provides Game Flier with a high-performance server load balancing platform to ensure its Web portal applications are always performing, available and scalable for increased user growth.

Game Flier selected A10's AX 2100 because it provides the highest performance on the market at the most competitive price. The AX Series is the first family of server load balancers that is tuned for multi-core CPU systems and capable of handling today's bandwidth intensive and high volume applications such as Game Flier's Web portal system...
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GenieKnows.com is a local search engine that connects search technology, community and content by developing niche-specific portals tailored for distinct searching communities, delivering a focused, useful and rewarding search experience. One of its key portals, GenieKnowsMedia.com, is a business-to-business (B2B) portal that empowers a broad distribution network for its advertisers, helping businesses connect with consumers and grow their bottom line by conveying meaningful, revenue-generating search results. Both are divisions of IT Interactive Services, Inc., a private Canadian media incorporation headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

GenieKnows.com has 20 million business listing records with 170,000 unique visitors a month, and growing at 34-40% per month. In addition, GenieKnows.com has partnerships with companies such as Yahoo! and City Search to pull in sponsored search links with these partners. GenieKnowsMedia.com has 2 billion search requests on a monthly basis. Two datacenters run both web sites for redundancy...
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Hawkins is a chemical manufacturing provider with 300 employees and 10 servers running enterprise software. After evaluating and researching solutions, Hawkins chose a pair of A10's AX 2000 nextgeneration server load balancers and replaced the incumbent F5 BIG-IP...
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In 2008, McMaster began a selection process to replace the incumbent WebCT 4.1 Learning Management System (LMS), choosing the Blackboard Academic Suite 8 and Blackboard Vista 8. The new system allows comprehensive e-Learning, course and student management, while also adding Web 2.0 collaborative features for community and content.

To ensure the Blackboard platform is highly available and to power the new features, McMaster also required an upgrade of the underlying system architecture, including both physical and virtual servers. The applications are web-based, so an Application Delivery Controller was also needed, principally to provide application acceleration, load balancing and Layer 7 scripting with rewrite functionality.

The AX Series was chosen by McMaster in a high availability configuration for maximum redundancy. In addition to delivering twice the performance at half the price of the competitors, AX Series satisfied the functional requirements as well as solving some key implementation issues...
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MEVIO is one of the fastest growing entertainment sites on the Web, with an audience of over six million monthly viewers. To keep its Web environment running, a cost-effective, highperformance server load balancer platform was required.

MEVIO chose two AX 2200 server load balancers in a High Availability (HA) pair for the production network, and one AX 2000 for staging...
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Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited (NasdaqGS: SNDA) is a leading interactive media entertainment company in China, offering a diverse portfolio of entertainment content including some of the most popular massively multi-player online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), casual online games and a variety of cartoons, literature and music.

Jinjiang (jjwxc.net), a subsidiary of Shanda, is the largest and most popular female creative writing web site in China. The users who regularly visit the site to research the original essays generate more than 50 million page views daily from 500,000 independent viewers that typically average up to 49 minutes per session on the site. This volume is increasing rapidly with traffic having increased over 300% since the end of 2007, so scaling growth is paramount to success.

Jinjiang's network includes a 100% BSD/Linux server infrastructure running eCommerce web applications with MySQL databases on the backend to handle the current load of over 100,000 creative writing purchase transactions daily. Previously, an open source load balancing product called HAProxy was in place, but this was not enough to meet the performance requirements. To handle the rapidly growing Internet traffic and eCommerce transactions, Shanda required a high-performance platform for its web servers to better manage the load. The company considered solutions from F5 and Citrix NetScaler, but after rigorous technical testing made the decision to purchase A10's AX Series.
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ShareCompany (www.sharecompany.nl), based in the Netherlands, is a leading provider of managed solutions for banks, brokers and media. Servicing large companies such as ABN, AMRO, Rabobank, RTL, SNS Bank and more, ShareCompany's products include websites, streaming market data terminals and web services for various applications. ShareCompany has over one million online users a day, viewing content from its managed solutions.

Due to increased demand by high-profile customers, ShareCompany needed to set up a second data center, and hired consulting firm and reseller partner Quanza Engineering to design the new network with requirements for high availability, performance and reliability. ShareCompany previously deployed F5 Networks' Big-IP load balancers in its old network; however, to meet the increased requirements for the second data center, Quanza recommended A10's AX Series new generation server load balancers for the company's application delivery needs.

ShareCompany's new data center infrastructure includes servers running on Windows 2003 and 2008 platforms, with applications that handle, process and distribute financial market information with rates of up to 400,000 records per second, including XML feeds and many other sources. The information is stored in SQL and memory databases and streamed via web servers which host its customers' websites.
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Shasta County's charter is to distribute information as quickly, efficiently and cost effectively as possible to the public. Shasta County selected A10's AX Series for an infrastructure upgrade, fulfilling its charter through the ability to handle increased load for the next five years....
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Shopzilla.com and BizRate.com, typically serve 50,000 to 70,000 concurrent users at any given time.

Predicted traffic growth signaled a need for additional load balancer capacity, so Shopzilla required an alternative to the installed Juniper DXs, which had reached end of life. A10 Networks' AX 3200 server load balancers were selected as they addressed both the low latency and high simultaneous connection requirements...
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In the early stages of SK Life's business, the focus was on customer acquisition and retention and return on investment. In addition, today's business challenges include a government open insurance policy and various insurance package options, delivering multipe layers of complexity and creating a need for simulataneous data exchanges so that employees can quickly and effectively service clients.

To meet the requirements for simultaneous information sharing within the organization, SK Life deployed six Web application servers for its internal applications and storage. Initially, the applications ran at 5 Mbps, but after the integrated investment insurance policies took place, the need increased to 30 Mbps. Increased internal application traffic caused network latency whereby employees had to wait to get online and collect client and program information, and as a result business opportunities were lost.

Upon research, SK Life learned that network congestion could be resolved with an advanced Application Delivery Controller (ADC), and contacted A10 Networks to evaluate its award-winning AX Series ADCs. Upon deploying the AX Series, SK Life immediately realized the benefits and made the purchase.
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Server Load Balancing is the key solution in Taobao's data center and CDN sites to achieve network stability, scalability and reliability. With nearly 100 million registered users and growing, data center traffic can be taxing on the network and application servers. To better handle traffic surges and volume growth, and to ensure that the site is always available for users, Taobao began researching new load balancing options. They needed a solution that not only can handle the rapidly increasing load on Layer 4 services in the data center, but also can provide better Layer 7 performance to accommodate the demands on the CDN and its nodes.

In Taobao's previous data center deployment, the old systems could not provide the required high performance at Layer 7, and were aging and unstable. After evaluating A10's AX Series and as well as newer models from incumbent vendors, the Taobao.com IT team concluded the AX's Layer 4-7 performance was much higher than the other vendors', enough to meet Taobao's network needs, and decided to make the transition to AX Series.
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University of the Arts London is a vibrant world center for innovation, comprising six internationally renowned colleges. It is Europe's largest university for art, design, fashion, communication and the performing arts.

University of the Arts London leverages Web technologies to provide a multitude of applications and services to its students and faculty. It has over 25 Websites with interactive content, including bandwidth-intensive graphic applications. Its infrastructure spans two datacenters and consists of Apache servers running on VMware that communicate with and retrieve information from the MySQL and Oracle databases on the backend.

In 2009, University of the Arts London began a new Web service project to create a new architecture capable of providing optimized content delivery to site visitors. The project consisted of an initial phase: Redesign and build a new hardware/software platform, which included replacing the existing Radware server load balancers whose capacity was maxed out.
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USA 800 has three sites, each of which are contact centers for multiple partners, whereby applications are served from two data centers. Predicting record traffic for the 2008 holiday shopping season, USA 800 required a new high-performance server load balancer platform.

After researching multiple load balancing solutions such as F5's BIG-IP, USA 800 chose A10's AX 2100s and deployed them near the end of October 2008, less than 30 days before the 2008 holiday shopping season. For USA 800, online customer traffic generated between the third week in November and the Christmas holiday every year contributes to a critically significant portion of annual revenue, so stability, redundancy and failover features were essential. Upon deployment, the AX 2100s managed capacity flawlessly, and aided USA 800 in experiencing the most successful holiday season in its history...
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To manage the bandwidth and deliver quality of service (QoS) for its networks, Bentley University previously deployed Packeteer’s PacketShapers. However, with support coming up for renewal, the University evaluated alternative solutions and learned that A10’s EX Series high performance bandwidth management appliances deliver increased functionality for the same cost as renewing the PacketShapers. In addition, Bentley University upgraded the bandwidth on its two network links, which would have required license upgrades on the PacketShapers that combined with the renewals would total two to three times the cost of the new EX Series appliances.

Immediately upon deployment, the EX Series blocked undesirable network traffic, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. The EX Series delivers granular visibility into the network so that network traffic can be blocked by LDAP user credentials, IP ranges, departments, dorms and many other criteria...
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China Construction Bank needed a centralized management platform to provide AAA services for multiple internal access points (VPN, internal 802.1X, etc.). The bank required seamless integration with existing user accounts in RADIUS and eDirectory servers to track users' network activities. It also wanted to understand which users were using each application.

China Construction Bank implemented A10 Networks' IDsentrie for network identity management, and EX Series Secure WAN Manager with user identity visibility...
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etón needed a major network & security tune-up to keep up with its network traffic growth. EX Series offered etón bandwidth management with unprecedented visibility and IDsentrie offered an extremely cost-effective Identity & Access Management solution.

etón chose the EX Series Secure WAN Manager and IDsentrie identity management appliance from A10 Networks to handle these many complex network management, visibility, identity and security tasks. The EX Series delivers etón the capability to manage its network's capacity with full application and user identity visibility...
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Due to increased network demands, Laramie County Community College (LCCC) was in the process of evaluating its external bandwidth demands and redundancy. To this aim LCCC added an extra Internet link and conducted a review of their aging packet shaper.

LCCC purchased A10 Networks' EX Series appliance due to its ability to provide both Quality of Service (QoS) and link load balancing. In tandem, LCCC also evaluated a pair of A10's ID Series network identity management appliances to augment the visibility capabilities of the EX Series with user identity (ID) information.

The EX was placed in transparent mode on the internal side of the network and immediately started gathering information on all the traffic flowing through it. The EX linked seamlessly to the ID Series appliances that had been configured to extract IP-to-ID (Internet Protocol to Identity) information from the Active Directory and Novell eDirectory systems...
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Sinarmas Life delivers life insurance with 500 employees as part of the major Sinarmas conglomerate. It required a bandwidth management and link load balancing solution to increase performance and availability for applications that run across multiple ISP links.

Sinarmas Life selected and deployed the EX Series as it supports automatic failover and link load balancing over multiple Internet links to allow non-stop network operations and better network performance. The EX Series met and exceeded the project's functional requirements with additional features...
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Chengdu Telecom needed a centralized management platform to provide authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) services and better internal access control. The telecom also needed to increase working efficiency, simplify user account management and track users' network activities.

Chengdu Telecom implemented A10 Networks' IDsentrie identity management appliance, which includes high-availability features for a robust and flexible solution...
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From30 has 120 employees that access a network comprised of MS SQL, MAIL, ERP, Linux Servers, Windows 2003 Server and a SSL VPN Server. To properly control and secure its diverse network and business assets, the company needed an identity management system that understands which users are accessing the development and account servers, in real-time, so that users without sanctioned access are not permitted on the network.

From30 chose A10 Networks' IDsentrie network identity management appliance because it is the leading product on the market with strong centralized network management, combined with identity-based reporting...
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Interline Brands has a heterogeneous network, running numerous applications and platforms such as Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, Oracle, AIX, Windows Servers, Unisys, VMware, Lotus Notes, Unix, Appworx, JDE, EDI and more. With numerous clients and products, and 3,500 employees, Interline Brands relies on LDAP authentication and Active Directory to secure its diverse network. Due to its diverse network, Interline Brands received a high volume of Help Desk calls regarding forgotten passwords and user account management.

A10's ID Series provides Interline Brands a User Self Service Web Portal for password and account management...
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Kyungpook National University, located in the Republic of Korea, with 20,000 students experiences a large amount of wireless traffic, with 20% to 30% of its students using the wireless network each day. To connect to the wireless network, each student has their account and PC, with its unique network MAC (Media Access Control) address, registered with a legacy RADIUS server in a manual process that could take up to two days. Along with the complicated and manual registration process, the network was running the older, less secure WEP (Wireless Equivalency Protocol). Administrators found tracking "who is on the network" difficult as they often had to start user resolution with only a MAC address, which assured the machine, but not necessarily the user on the machine.

A10's ID Series provides Kyungpook National University with student authentication and tracking abilities...
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Today, Postini is using its IDSentrie system to provide rapid, automated provisioning of employee accounts and RADIUS authentication with full logging.

The Unified Identity Management (UIM) interface built into IDSentrie has been extremely useful in streamlining Postini's previously manual process and mitigating security risk. Postini particularly values the IDSentrie system's unique combination of strong RADIUS authentication plus firewall log analysis, and the ability to manage all of these critical functions using the system's centralized interface and its built-in, identity-based reports...
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To ensure accuracy, Shinyoung Securities desired a solution that could process any update to user information on the Human Resources SAP Oracle Database and replicate it to all the companies' applications automatically, without human interaction. This in turn would save administrators time, ensure accuracy and avoid user confusion, while having a knock on effect in helping to reduce associated help desk calls.

The solution had to process all possible user based changes made on the Human Resources SAP Oracle Database, and make the equivalent changes, at a minimum on Oracle, UNIX and Windows. Due to the fact that no access to systems means a halt to user productivity, the username and password changes were of key concern.

Shinyoung Securities selected A10's ID Series for an automatic simplified user management solution through centralized provisioning...
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Sichuan Mobile needed a centralized, flexible, robust and secure management platform to meet its AAAA requirements, dealing with various types of network devices and internal user groups with different roles.

Sichuan Mobile implemented A10 Networks' IDsentrie identity management appliance, which includes high availability features for a robust and flexible solution...
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With its customer base and web traffic growing, Silicon Valley Web Hosting (SVWH) needed a simpler way to centralize all account provisioning, management, and inventory across its 320 servers. SVWH also wanted to improve visibility and security on its network to fight spam, viruses and other threats.

Now, with the A10 Networks' IDSentrie 1000 Smart Identity Management system in place, these tasks are automated and managing the network is greatly simplified. ...
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Smart City recently replaced its aging RADIUS authentication server with A10 Networks' IDsentrie network identity management appliance. Smart City's decision to upgrade to the IDsentrie appliance was based on its need to support increasing year over year growth at the convention centers, while ensuring scalability for predicted future growth trends.

A10's IDsentrie provides Smart City an authentication platform for its events, including CES 2008, which included over 2700 exhibitors and 100,000 visitors...
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Relying on multiple disparate backend computer systems to store account information is a necessary practice in schools and Universities today. This in turn has resulted in additional user IDs, passwords and user data, which need to be synchronized accurately between the systems.

With around 2000 students and 350 faculty and staff, Tokyo Zokei University is no exception to this scenario, employing several user data stores like Microsoft Active Directory, Macintosh OpenDirectory, RedHat Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris UNIX to make changes as they are needed. However a manual update process resulted in complicated tasks because the operations of each system are different...
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