A10 set to speed up traffic

Application delivery controller (ADC) company A10 is set to jump on the growing interest in cloud computing. The company is set to introduce a range of products aimed squarely at cloud providers, ISPs and larger enterprises.

The company, which launched in Europe last autumn, has announced the release of three products within its AX Series range, as well as introducing virtualisation management software.

The first of the new products is the AX-V Appliance, designed to run soft ADCs. With AX-V, customers can respond to changing traffic volume by provisioning and de-provisioning multiple higher performance AX VMs or third party virtual machines as required.

Todd Kleppe A10's senior director of operations said that one of the unique offerings was the virtual chassis which allows organisations to efficiently scale as they grow, with two to eight AX Series devices in a virtual cluster, which operates as a unified single device. "We're really ahead of the competition with this one. If you look at what F5 is offering: the Viprion was 1 million connections per second, our 5200 is driving 3 million connections per second and we're half the price. To be fair, F5 have just announced a refresh and doubled the performance but we're still beating them with our chassis. And when out eight of these together, you've got a massive beast."

"What's more," said  Paul Nicholson, A10's senior product marketing manager, "because it's virtual, it's a cheaper option. If you're going down a chassis with a blade route, then you have to buy the chassis and the blade upfront, we offer a genuine pay as you grow option."

Also launched was the Software AX virtual machine that can be run on commodity hardware. It's unique and first to market - a hardware appliance based on soft ADC, said Nicholson.

In addition to the three launches, the company has also upgraded its virtualisation software to complement the new products. The expanded functionality will include granular Layer 3 network virtualisation and hardware virtualisation.

Last week's Gartner prediction that 20 percent of organisations will dump their existing in-house IT department and move to a cloud-based model within a couple of years has caused a stir with companies itching to prove their credentials in this field. A10 will be keen to lay out their credentials in this particular field. "We're not only a perfect match for cloud computing," said Kleppe, "but our software is delivered by SaaS so we eat our own dog food.

The products will be available in Q2 this year, although the AX virtualisation is available now, with enhancements to be delivered throughout the year.