The setup was a little challenging, but the company, A10 Networks, was very willing to help and very present during the entire phase of the setup. They even helped us mitigate certain issues and new challenges we presented to them as a new customer. They were completely willing to work with us through all our issues to get us up and running. And once everything was up and running, we turned it on. Until we were presented a minor issue related to how the unit works, we forgot that we had turned it on. That's how well it was doing its job.

We haven't had to use the solution's traffic flow management capabilities to troubleshoot traffic flow issues, but to diagnose issues that came up during the setup, the built-in utilities and some of the display infographics in the user interface definitely assisted in identifying first that there was a problem, and second where to go find a solution for the problem.

Because we were busy and deep into other projects, our deployment was a little bit longer than most. We had about a year's worth of deployment time.

Initially, our deployment plan was to get the device up and running by using the templates and A10 was helping us do that. That's where we discovered the first issue, but the company worked with us to get everything straightened out and fixed. Once the issues were identified and resolved, then it was trial and error to get the right combination of settings for our environment. Once we achieved that, we were good to go.

It took three people to deploy and one person to maintain it. The three people are me and two engineers with our company. I'm also the person who manages it as the systems administrator.

The initial setup was very simple.

For our topology, the initial setup was complex. Overall, the setup operation is very easy. You put one box on your internal network, you put the other box on your external network, and then intercept traffic. What was complex in our topology was that we also to load-balance our internet traffic between proxies. That was the tough point of our project. But that's not the fault of A10. It was something we requested. I am happy we had A10 to support that.

The design process was very long but the implementation took something like two weeks. Including the designing, it took two months.

Last year, we migrated our data center to a new data center and we implemented everything there with A10. Then we tested it and then we forwarded the traffic to the new data center. We didn't implement it directly in the production environments. We implemented it at first in a very clean environment, tested it, and then forwarded our users' and servers' traffic to the A10 environment.