Case Studies > Leading Australian ISP Required a Streamlined Approach to Network Management

Leading Australian ISP Required a Streamlined Approach to Network Management

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Pacific

Country

Australia

Product

A10 ADC
Brocade ADX
Citrix
F5

Tech Stack

Multi-tenancy
High Availability (HA)
SSL Offload
Application Delivery Partitions (ADPs)

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications
Software

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Quality Assurance

Services

System Integration
Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Founded in 2006, Servers Australia is a dedicated Internet Service Provider (ISP) delivering custom hosting services to the largest Australian businesses, including the Australian government. Its customers are promised the best service in the industry, and offered an end-to-end integrated infrastructure that both hosts and delivers applications to users around the globe. Servers Australia is dedicated to providing the highest standards in customer service. It does this by solving its customers’ most complicated problems, which frequently means adopting and integrating new technologies to provide cutting-edge and highly-customized solutions.

The Challenge

Due to its approach of adopting the latest technologies, Servers Australia manages several different solutions concurrently to cater to various customer requirements. Over the years, the company installed a number of products, including Citrix and F5, for load balancing, high availability and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection. Managing the different systems became a challenge, and made it more difficult to resolve customer issues promptly. This, in turn, was impacting Servers Australia’s commitment to provide the best customer service in the industry. Servers Australia took corrective action by looking for a single solution that could meet all their customers’ needs and cover the wide variety of requirements.

The Solution

Servers Australia began testing A10 Networks’ Application Delivery Controllers (A10 ADC), as well as Brocade’s ADX platform; however, A10 ADC was the prominent choice. “What immediately drew our attention to the A10 ADC was the ability for multi-tenancy within a single device. This gave us the opportunity to offer our customers a solution where they could directly manage their own load balancing requirements,” declared Craig Smithers, Sales Manager for Servers Australia. “Feedback from our customers and technicians is that the A10 ADC increased performance while reducing management and configuration time.” Although A10 Networks is relatively new to the Australian market, A10 ADC immediately stood out as a highly-flexible, high-performance solution. Customer feedback made it clear that the A10 ADC was the best answer for Servers Australia’s ADC multi-vendor consolidation project. During the initial testing phase the A10 ADC performed above expectations in all areas that were tested. As a result, Servers Australia moved all its customers off of the incumbent legacy platforms.

Operational Impact

Servers Australia utilizes the A10 ADC multi-tenancy features to concentrate its clients’ diverse environments onto a single pair of A10 ADC appliances. With Application Delivery Partitions (ADPs), an A10 ADC can deliver more than a hundred virtual ADC instances, consolidating the ADC into virtual platforms, and improving overall efficiency. This allows each partition to act as if it were a unique ADC appliance.
The A10 ADC provides maximum uptime for applications. The A10 ADC’s High Availability (HA) feature provides sub-second failover and session synchronization between units; ensuring continuous connectivity for an enhanced user experience. Therefore, any failure will pass unnoticed by the end-users, as one A10 ADC appliance transparently replaces the other’s tasks. For Servers Australia, downtime is unacceptable. The A10 ADC ensures network maintenance is transparent and hitless.
The A10 ADC includes an easy-to-use web-based GUI, allowing administrators to configure their own load balancing services. In addition to the intuitive GUI, the A10 ADC offers an effective, industry-standard CLI; providing Servers Australia engineers flexible management options and easy deployment. The A10 ADC’s wide range of active monitoring and reporting capabilities enables customers to effectively observe activity on their system partitions, while allowing the Servers Australia team to globally manage the device.
Rising industry standards for minimum SSL encryption levels have placed an undue burden on backend servers. The A10 ADC relieves server hardware of this burden by managing CPU-intensive SSL traffic with its dedicated SSL ASIC processors. Processing SSL traffic on the A10 ADC device seamlessly increases transaction speeds, decreases server hardware requirements and provides ease of administration.

Quantitative Benefit