[124140] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Experiences with A10 AX series Load Balancers?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Welch, Bryan)
Wed Mar 24 21:51:32 2010
From: "Welch, Bryan" <Bryan.Welch@arrisi.com>
To: Darren Bolding <darren@bolding.org>, Justin Horstman
<jhorstman@adknowledge.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:50:42 -0700
In-Reply-To: <5a318d411003241846ue709334icce03515da414d3e@mail.gmail.com>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Yes, agreed. I think the Netscaler falls into the category of the Cisco in=
this respect <ducks>. Seems the F5 gear is the 1000lb gorilla in this cat=
egory and for the most part we have no reason to look anywhere else other t=
han doing our own due diligence with respect to the other vendor offerings =
in this space.
Regards,
Bryan
From: packetmonger@gmail.com [mailto:packetmonger@gmail.com] On Behalf Of D=
arren Bolding
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 6:46 PM
To: Justin Horstman
Cc: Welch, Bryan; nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: Experiences with A10 AX series Load Balancers?
Very interesting to see about A10's performance- I've heard mixed things ab=
out them.
Just an FYI, the newer F5 platforms don't utilize the ASIC's- the performan=
ce curve of general-purpose CPU's has once again eclipsed what can be done =
with specialized silicon without aggressive (and expensive) revision cycles=
. The ASIC's also could only be used in simpler virtual server configurati=
ons and with certain subsets of iRules.
That said, nothing else I'm aware of provides the functionality of iRules. =
I've used netscalers only a relatively small amount- and they are nice- pa=
rticularly if your requirements are within their feature set- but my experi=
ence has been that things I take for granted using an iRule are seriously p=
ainful to implement on a netscaler.
--D
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Justin Horstman <jhorstman@adknowledge.com=
<mailto:jhorstman@adknowledge.com>> wrote:
The boxes do alright at low load levels. They do not have an asic tech like=
the F5s so choke on large amounts of traffic. Management is a bit immature=
and you will find yourself having to use the CLI and the Gui to accomplish=
most advanced tasks.
When we put them head to head A10 AX3200 vs F5 6400 ltm (note: 6400 was wha=
t we were looking to replace)
Test:
1000 concurrent users from Gomez's Networks Loadtesting platform hitting as=
fast as the requests would close, going through our standard vip config on=
the f5, and the A10 engineering teams 3 best efforts to beat that config =
that balanced between two Identical Dell 1950 servers serving a php page t=
hat responded with a random number (to avoid caching). The 6400 we used was=
in production at the time, and was older so we were expecting to get blown=
away, see the results here:
F5 - Peaked 160k completed transactions a minute sustained for 10 minutes, =
0 errors, 112ms average transaction response time
A10 - Held 60k completed transactions a minute sustained for 10 minutes, 0 =
errors, 360ms average transaction response time
If anyone is interested in the graphs I think I can still pull them out of =
gomez. Though notable that this was all done a year ago, so things might be=
different now.
~J
-----Original Message-----
From: Welch, Bryan [mailto:Bryan.Welch@arrisi.com<mailto:Bryan.Welch@arrisi=
.com>]
Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 8:35 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org<mailto:nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Experiences with A10 AX series Load Balancers?
Does anyone have any experiences good/bad/indifferent with this company and=
their products? They claim 2x the performance at =BD the cost and am a bi=
t leery as you can imagine.
We are looking to replace our aging F5 BigIP LTM's and will be evaluating t=
hese along with the Netscaler and new generation F5 boxes.
Regards,
Bryan
--
-- Darren Bolding --
-- darren@bolding.org<mailto:darren@bolding.org> --
