Before A10, we didn't have any load balancing capabilities. Now we use a different partition for the DNS infrastructure with the DNS firewall. The unit uses a separate partition for the internal- and for the external-facing. Before, everything was connected together, and we couldn't split very easily between test, production, and development.

The effect of the solution on our efficiency is that before, we only had round-robin DNS load balancing capabilities, with no health-checking, for example. Or we would have to use network-based load balancing from Microsoft. All that can bring a network down quite quickly, if you configure things incorrectly. With A10, we have a very robust load balancing solution that is capable, like F5, of iRule or aFleX scripting. You can influence the complete packet instead of just a few bytes or bits of the packets, depending on whether it's http or another Layer 4 to Layer 7 traffic flow.

It helps us operational when had our DDoS attack. We got a call at two o'clock in the morning one day from one of our service providers that there was a DDoS attack happening against one of our IPs. We looked at the way our network was configured, then we looked into the best way to mitigate it. We knew that our A10 had the capability, but we didn't have it enabled at the time. We called support and were able to get it enabled. Immediately, we stopped that DDoS attack. From an operational perspective, we had a down situation that we were able to quickly resolve and bringing it.

It also helps out a lot, from an operational perspective, when we are load balancing our servers, whether application or web. It is real easy to do a maintenance window. I can go into any of my service groups, then take the servers out of the service group and do maintenance on half of the servers while the other half are still online. I can get all those updated, back up to date, and put all of them back, then take the other half out and update them. So, it allows us to do seamless updates to our servers and application infrastructure.

A10 Networks Thunder ADC's use has been beneficial for my company.

It was our first step into having high availability. Before, we had a lot of things tied to one server. So, if that server/application were to crash, that would affect our users. By putting A10 Thunder in front of it, this improved our uptime and availability.

Our operations pretty much stayed the same. If anything, people got more relaxed. Because before we only had one server, and if that server went down, then we had to react rather quickly. Having multiple servers now in the APN front-ending it, if a server went down, then there may be three or four other servers sitting there doing the work.

We see a 21 to 50 percent change in traffic typically year-over-year. Our demographic is changing so we have more members who are coming to connect to get their financial statements. So, there is growth of our pension system.

A10 explained why the latency dropped significantly on a site that we have.

It gives me information on load balancing and offloading, which provides me information on performance.

It has provided improvement in regards to flexibility of our applications between data centers.

It does improve operational efficiency, but it's not overwhelming.

It's seamless.

The solution has made things easier in terms of operations efficiency It's one less thing to worry about. It just sits and it runs. 

It has definitely improved the way our organization performs. Our company is mostly an education institution. We have a campus and an administration where we host all the enterprise applications. With enterprise applications going to six separate entities, it requires a lot of hardware underlying the applications. So load balancing has worked very well.

It definitely has enhanced our application security and our application accessibility. We don't have to go with the original application, the built-in, round-robin kind of thing. The security features, like SSL version 3.0 or TLS 1.2, mean it has pretty good options in the way the application can be configured to make it more secure, as well as the number of servers that are behind it and the way it chooses its servers.

It solved the CGNAT performance issues and, within two years, it had no problems and no outages.