Stabilizing Portal Services with AX Series

Excite Japan Co., Ltd. operates its “Excite” portal, a site which links search engines, media, and entertainment. A10’s AX Series has been selected by Excite Japan, who has been expanding its services to quickly understand users' needs and translate them into reality. This includes providing applications for the increasingly popular smartphones and adopting instantaneous translation services in order to further improve service stability. Excite Japan provides various portal services, such as “Excite” and “Beauty Navi” that have been steadily attracting more users – and an application download service for smartphones with a large number of downloads recorded. The portal service operates as its core business, so Excite must offer a comfortable interface to users, and operate a stable network infrastructure to support it.

Excite Japan Co., Ltd. provides various portal services, such as “Excite” and “Beauty Navi” that have been steadily attracting more users – and an application download service for smartphones with a large number of downloads recorded. The portal service operates as its core business, so Excite must offer a comfortable interface to users, and operate a stable network infrastructure to support it. Excite addresses several business issues in order to run a stable infrastructure. “DDoS attacks targeting the websites of public offices and organizations, such as SYN flood attacks, have been increasing year by year, so Excite Japan also looks at ways to further reinforce security while maintaining the current performance.” “As our service expands, unexpected traffic loads may occur, and an increase in traffic is anticipated in the near future. In order to manage this, we sought to reinforce the system by installing a more spacious load balancer in terms of performance.” Simultaneously, Excite Japan considered reinforcing IPv6 support in order to handle a surge in IPv6 clients following the announcement that IPv4 addresses were exhausted in 2011.

In order to resolve those issues, Excite started to consider future load balancers since the end of 2011. Initially, several products appeared to satisfy the requirements and were listed as candidates. Additional consideration was given to compact products that provided superior performance, and several models including the AX Series were shortlisted. After a comparison from various angles – including price and performance, which was verified using actual equipment – A10’s AX3200-12s were selected. Impacting the decision were existing success stories where the AX Series has been deployed for international mission-critical services, such as major portal sites and carriers, and have demonstrated stable operation. The AX Series powered by A10’s Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) and 64-bit dedicated hardware offers completely independent parallel processing with multi-CPUs to fully utilize the CPU performance. As a result, the AX3200-12 provides high performance of 1.1 million L4 connections per second (CPS) and security features in a compact 1U form factor appliance. The primary deciding factor in Excite’s selection was its ability to use the equipment in the same way as its existing products. “We may normally believe that replacing existing equipment is troublesome, but the AX Series supports an industry standard CLI and GUI and offers excellent operability, delivering ease of use.” Another consideration was A10’s support service. “Whatever the product, some sort of problem will always occur. The important point is how quickly support is provided when that happens. A10 has support centers in Japan, so their service is reliable and speedy.”

• Excite Japan has installed multiple AX 3200-12 appliances, which deliver high performance security protection, and currently handles the traffic for the whole service with a redundant configuration.
• HTTP load balancing, L7 load balancing using aFleX, and DDoS protection in hardware are included.
• The transition to IPv6 has been reinforced while high performance protection against SYN flood attacks have also been enabled.
• Excite has been able to implement security measures while keeping costs much lower than if they had installed an expensive firewall.
• Excite is not required to purchase additional licenses per function or bandwidth, which is helpful.

• The AX3200-12 provides high performance of 1.1 million L4 connections per second (CPS).