Overview

As the global recession of 2009 morphs into the global recovery of 2010, CIOs will continue to face a financial climate highlighted by uncertainty and tremendous IT budgetary pressures.  In this economy, the ‘do more with less’ IT mantra will continue unabated, but CIOs are still responsible for IT departments that drive the business, create new revenue opportunities, and improve business processes.  These IT priorities were clearly reflected by ESG research data in early 2009: When asked to identify business initiatives with the greatest impact on IT, survey respondents said that cost reduction initiatives and business process improvement were their organization’s highest priorities (see Figure 1).[1] Given the remaining economic clouds, CIOs will likely have similar priorities moving forward.

The top two objectives presented here are interrelated, leading to competing challenges for CIOs.  Business process improvements often require new types of Web 2.0 applications for improved collaboration and communications.  These applications, in turn, demand high performance/low latency networking to support more sessions, connections, rich content, and security services.  How in the world can CIOs develop new applications and enhance application delivery services when they are under intense pressure to avoid big purchases and continue to cut costs?

What Can be Done?

At its root, IT has but one purpose: align business goals with technology tools to improve responsiveness, productivity, and automation.  This goal doesn’t change during tough economic times, but since CIOs are forced to squeeze resources, they must move beyond status-quo solutions and approach their jobs with creativity, flexibility, and open minds.  To achieve this goal, ESG sees progressive organizations:

• Simplifying network architectures. Most networks grew organically over time—a new subnet here, a new VLAN there, and servers everywhere.  It doesn’t take too long for this ad-hoc growth to create a rat’s nest of wires and lots of operational overhead.  Smart organizations are actively addressing this network mess by consolidating data centers, collapsing disparate data center segments into flat L2 networks, and adopting server virtualization.
• Implementing all-in-one enterprise technologies. As part of simplifying their networks, many organizations are looking to replace their portfolios of network appliances with high-performance, multi-function systems.  These “Network Services Super Gateways” (NSSGs) are the networking equivalent of super computers, designed to balance large parallel workloads across shared memory and processors while accommodating split second changes in requirements.  ESG sees strong demand for NSSGs in two areas:  network security and Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs).
• Evaluating alternative vendors. Through the years, many networking vendors have become complacent when it comes to innovation.  These vendors tend to offer high priced/high margin products that can’t help CIOs contain capital or operating costs.  ESG sees more and more large organizations opening the door to new network upstarts with modern products that take advantage of Moore’s Law to offer tremendous scale and performance in a consolidated, low-cost footprint.

NSSGs Offer New Performance and Economic Model

A few years ago, ESG was introduced to A10 Networks, a Silicon Valley-based startup with an impressive networking and IT industry pedigree.  The company was founded in 2004 by Lee Chen, former co-founder and VP of Engineering at Foundry Networks.  Since its inception, A10 has been focused on creating a radically new ADC architecture in order to deliver twice the performance at half the price of its competitors.  To accomplish this, A10 equipped its ADCs with:

• Custom hardware. In assessing the ADC market, A10 discovered that a lot of operations were performed in software.  This meant that available ADC performance was extremely limited unless customers were willing to ‘throw a lot of hardware’ at the problem by purchasing additional modules, processors, or memory.  Following an old Silicon Valley formula, A10 moved a lot of ADC processes from software to hardware in its high-end appliances.  This design gives A10 boxes extremely high performance in small cost-effective devices.
• A scalable operating system. Rather than simply customize the Linux operating system, A10 built its Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) from the ground up to take advantage of modern multi-core processors.  This helps A10 achieve linear scalability across a unique shared memory system.

These advances alone made A10 Networks an attractive option for enterprise customers with lots of Internet-facing applications.  Recently, however, A10 Networks upped the ante by introducing:

• A 64-bit version of ACOS. A10 may be the first ADC vendor to extend its operating system and data path from 32- to 64-bit.  What’s the big deal?  While a wider data path allows for an increase of data processing, the most immediate benefit is the unlocking of memory resources; 32-bit systems are limited to 4 GB of memory per CPU core.  Since so many functions in the ADC are dependent on memory, A10’s 64-bit systems can scale all operations—the number of users, connections, services, RAM caching, etc.  The 64-bit OS creates a win for the IT department (more sessions per ADC appliance to drive consolidation) and a win for the customer (more RAM cache equals faster content and transaction delivery).

In summary, the wider data path allows for an exponential increase in data processing.  Think of a 2 lane highway. Increasing the speed limit on the highway could potentially increase the number of cars traveling on the road, but there are physical limits to the increases. Alternatively, you increase the number of lanes from 2 to 8. In this case, even if each car never went any faster, it would still be possible to quadruple the amount of traffic.

• A range of 64-bit hardware platforms. As we’ve learned in other tech markets such as enterprise software and the video game industry, to unlock the power of 64-bit systems, a 64-bit OS must work with the overall hardware design. Otherwise, the system will default to the lower common denominator of 32-bit processing. A10 addressed this limitation with a new line of 64-bit AX Series hardware platforms running the 64-bit version of ACOS.

With a 64-bit platform utilizing shared memory, the AX platforms have the capacity to consolidate advanced enterprise features. This is attractive for customers with cloud computing, virtualization, and security initiatives as all of the advanced features can be run on a single application platform and can help reduce operating costs. All of the new 64-bit models include carrier grade hardware components, redundant power supplies for reliability, and solid state drives (SSDs) for the environmentally conscious.

• Advent of the NSSG “Supercomputer Class” ADCs. Previously, the only ADCs that could address the capacity for the world’s top enterprises, Web sites, and service providers were chassis-based systems with racks of blades. At the top of its 64-bit lineup, A10’s new high-end models are the first to bring this capability into 2U appliances that deliver up to 3 million Layer 4 connections per second and 40 Gbps throughput with up to 16 10Gb ports, surpassing most chassis systems currently available.  Both models have enough juice to serve as a data center application platform to run solutions for initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, IPv6, Large Scale Network Address Translation (NAT), security, and more in addition to core server load balancing and application acceleration functionality.  At under $200k with all features included, customers can decrease their cost per transaction while increasing user connections. Given this, A10’s NSSG “Supercomputer Class” ADCs should certainly be considered for demanding applications.
• An extended product line. In the past, ADCs were really limited to large enterprises.  Why?  Design limitations meant that ADCs were generally too expensive for smaller organizations.  Recently, however, A10 Networks broke through this enterprise-focused glass ceiling by extending its AX ADC product line down-market.  The ‘low-end’ AX 2500 comes in a 1U form factor, offers 10Gbps performance, and supports up to 300k L4 connections per second at a list price under $25k.  Each successive model number steps up the processor, memory, or both to boost advanced features such as RAM caching, layer 7 processing, and deep packet inspection performance.  ESG believes that this type of price/performance will be a perfect fit for small to extremely large enterprises seeking to start small and grow over time.
• An integrated DNS application firewall. While A10 downplayed this in its announcements, ESG believes that DNS firewall capabilities may be extremely attractive for enterprise customers with large, dynamic, and growing networks.  The DNS firewall performs three important functions:  1) It offloads DNS request traffic from the existing DNS infrastructure, 2) It acts as a DNS proxy blocking malicious DNS traffic and DDoS attacks, and 3) It throws A10’s signature high performance at DNS to accelerate the total network experience.

Ultimately, this technical mumbo-jumbo is easily summarized.  With its recent announcements, A10 Networks can pack more horsepower and ADC services into a family of extremely small, high-performing, and environmentally-friendly devices.  This should make the AX series even more attractive than it is today.

The Bigger Truth

While the economy remains in the doldrums, Internet innovation continues at a staggering pace.  Leading edge companies will continue to develop new Web-based applications, helping them increase revenue, improve productivity, and enhance collaboration.  In the near-term, however, large organizations will have to build this new software functionality while simultaneously reducing costs.

Difficult?  Yes.  Impossible?  No, but it will take creativity, IT simplification, consolidation, and creativity.  Progressive CIOs will extend this by eschewing the status quo and keeping an open mind toward new and innovative technology pioneers.  In ESG’s humble opinion, A10 Networks fits this description as it has attacked the existing ADC category with a new design, operating system, and economic model. Its recent 64-bit offering and the extension of its product line only add to the company’s unique value.  Given these qualities, CIOs would be wise to add A10 Networks to their short lists of ADC vendors.