The AX Series appliances from A10 Networks provide both load balancing and traffic acceleration features (i.e., hardware-accelerated SSL, TCP reuse, HTTP acceleration) primarily for server farms. As they are deployed in front of the server farms, their traffic inspection capabilities additionally enable them to provide basic security protection for the servers including hardware-based DoS Syn Defense and protection from protocol anomaly attacks.

A core feature of the appliances is their multi-CPU architecture and the vendor's Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS), which provides automated load-balancing between the multiple CPUs, which in turn all share a single high-speed memory pool (the vendor states that the CPUs are able to balance the system load without requiring the copying of data or replication of instructions between them). Additionally, dedicated ASICs are onboard facilitating traffic handling, SSL acceleration, and switching/routing.

An additional key feature of the platform is the vendor's aRule Policy Editor, a PC-based development platform (Windows XP/Vista) enabling developers/administrators to script traffic inspection rules for fine-grained control of the box's traffic redirection efforts. The scripting files created by the Policy Editor (and used by the box's aRule engine) are TCL-based, and can also be created directly through the device's CLI.

The appliance itself features redundant hot-swappable power-supplies on all models; and redundant, hot-swappable, RAID 1 protected disk drives on all but the lower end offering. Appliances can be deployed as active-active or active-standby (with stateful failover) N+1 clusters. Further, the appliances can be deployed in transparent (inline Layer 2 device, no modifications needed) or route-mode (with support for NAT, static, and dynamic routing) configurations.

Other features of the appliance include:

- CLI or GUI management

- Support for round robin, least connections, weighted RR, weighted LC, and fastest response time load balancing

- Server health monitoring

- HTTP acceleration features, including compression, connection multiplexing, and header insert, rewrite, and compression

- Support for SNMP, syslog, and alerting

Five models of the appliance are currently available:

- The AX 2000 boasts 8 copper Gig Ethernet ports, 2 SFP Mini GBICs, and dual single core CPUs. Only a single hard drive is included in the AX 2000, and the Flexible Traffic and Switch/Routing ASICs are not included (but the SSL ASIC is).

- The AX 2100 is similar to the AX 2000, except that it includes 4 SFP Mini GBICs (instead of 2), and dual multi-core CPUs. Additionally, the AX 2100 includes a pair of RAID 1 protected 80 GB hard drives.

- The AX 2200 and 3100 both include 16 copper Gig Ethernet ports, 4 SFP Mini GBICs, and dual multi-core CPUs. Dual disk drives (160 GB) are included in these appliances (as are all the ASICs described above). The AX 3100 adds a pair 10 Gig fiber transceivers.

- The AX3200 is the current top of the line model, and includes 16 copper Gig Ethernet ports, 4 SFP Mini GBICs, dual mult-core CPUs, dual disk drives, and 2 10 Gig fiber transceivers. The AX3200 additionally boasts 4 GB of memory; the other appliances each include only 2 GB (the 2100, 2200, and 3100 can each be upgraded to 4 GB if desired).

New features in the latest AX series release (features are supported across all models) include:

- Enhanced performance

- IPv6 support

- Support for black/white lists (w/up to 5 million entries) blocking or enabling traffic from specified clients or client sub-nets

- Support for STARTTLS (encryption used by SMTP servers)

- Support for SIP load balancing

The AX Series switches are available now. Base pricing ranges from $16,995 (2000) to $69,995 (3200). Visit the A10 Networks Web site for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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