A10 on the road to fast delivery

US application delivery controller company A10 has launched itself in the UK and has announced two new products to introduce itself to its UK customers.

The company, which comes up against F5 in the Level 4 caching space, has launched a new version of its ACOS operating system, claiming to be the first company to introduce a 64-bit application delivery controller.

Todd Kleppe, senior director of global operations said that ACOS was the "secret sauce" of A10's offering. He said that the architecture offered a host of features that made the product stand out from the competition. "There's shared memory, meaning that there's no requirement to copy data from CPU. In addition, there's great efficiency - as you add CPUs, the performance increases in a linear fashion, compared with some machines where adding CPUs doesn't get you the corresponding increase in performance.

He added that this architecture not only resulted in higher performance - claiming that the company's top-end product, the 5200 was three times as fast as F5's equivalent product and twice as fast as Foundry's - but that the product's architecture offered much cheaper price-performance too, with a cost per transaction of 6p compared with 28p for the competition.

Kleppe said there were other cost savings too."The 5200 uses just 680w compared to the 2600w from the competition and it's more compact too, ours is a two-rack unit compared to competitors' seven or eight rack units."

The company has also launched a DNS application firewall aimed at ISPs and carriers. The product has been designed to prevent DDoS attacks on a carrier's infrastructure. Kleppe said a key element for the product was the ability to load balance the DNS servers to validate the DNS requests.

For the UK launch, the company has signed up with value-added distributor Vadition and has opened a UK office at Canary Wharf, London.