A10 Networks Releases Fourth Generation Appliance Line

Application networking and security specialist A10 Networks announced six new Thunder Series appliances, fourth-generation offerings designed to expand customer choice for entry-level, upper mid-range and high-end appliances.

A10 offers a cloud ready platform with the ACOS Harmony architecture, which is fully programmable with 100 percent API coverage and many other advanced features per product to suit advanced data centers.

A10 products have a variety of form factors, including physical, software or cloud-based, ensuring flexibility.

In addition, all ACOS-based appliances leverage a data center efficient design, consuming less power, cooling, and rack space. Prices for the new hardware appliances start at $14,995.

“The scalability and price performance are also important, as shown by our fourth generation announcement,” Paul Nicholson, director of product marketing A10 Networks, told eWEEK. “The Thunder 7440s in one rack unit providing scalability to 220 Gbps of traffic per second, 10.5 million connections per second, and defense for over 300 million DDoS attacks per second. No other major ADC vendor can deliver this scale in a single rack unit appliance.”

Nicholson said what’s also notable about A10’s appliances is the breaking of the 10 million new connections per second rate in a single rack unit of a fully featured ADC.

“Data center growth is critical for businesses to be planning for, as digitalization has transformed how business’ and customers interact. If you can’t scale you can’t compete; whether that results in customers going to other sites, a negative brand impression, or inability to deliver a service, the result is the same lost revenue and customers,” Nicholson said. “We do not see this trend abating, the impact of more advanced technology and customer growth are constant, and successful organizations need to be setup to scale as the business demands.”

He explained scalability is important for appliances because of increased security requirements from mobile, cloud, and Web.

“For example total website encryption – not just sensitive pages, the move to more complex encryption with PFS, more attack detection, more robust DDoS defenses, stringent requirements for inspecting outbound SSL traffic,” he said.

Another reason Nicholson highlighted is the unrelenting growth of data center traffic and the Internet of things (IoT).

“More devices and users are connecting. Applications are now always on, and updating frequently, which has become the new normal that business need to satisfy, or be rendered obsolete,” he said.