New Zealand Council Future Proofs Network with A10 ADC Appliances

The Thames-Coromandel District Council (TCDC) in the North Island of New Zealand is seated in the town of Thames. It is located in the region around the Firth of Thames and Coromandel Peninsula, to the southeast of Auckland. It is the first District council to be formed in New Zealand, being constituted in 1975. As of June 2012, the population of the TCDC district is estimated at 27,000. Thames-Coromandel District Council (TCDC) in New Zealand has created a fast, reliable future-proofed network for interacting with and servicing its various communities. The main drivers of this efficient technology are two application delivery controllers from A10 Networks, whose benefits include enabling Council’s web pages to load five times faster than before.

TCDC manages social, economic, cultural, and environmental matters for a diverse community on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island. A wide array of online services comprise a key element of TCDC’s commitment to local businesses, residents, and internal users. These services include everything from waste collection to town planning, and span the gamut from libraries to environmental issues and local cemeteries. The TCDC relies heavily on web-based services to provide an efficient delivery mechanism to all parties and to support the organisation’s overall mission and goals. According to TCDC, the local authority focuses on ensuring that its communities have a good quality of life, now and in the future. TCDC identifies what its communities require and pinpoints the most effective ways of fulfilling those needs. The commitment to mission-critical online services demands a fast, reliable network. Based on its previous technology, TCDC’s ability to support the future requirements of all stakeholders was very limited. Performance, security, and overall manageability were being compromised and the situation was expected to deteriorate further as more applications were added to the network. Auckland-based IT consultants Network Edge, who have worked closely with TCDC for some years, suggested that TCDC look at ways of speeding up their applications and preparing the network for greater capacity in the near future. Paul Johnson from Network Edge said: “There were some performance issues with the network setup. Application delivery relied on an end-of-life (EOL) Microsoft ISA, which was fine initially, but the infrastructure could not meet increasing demands and support the new services TCDC were looking to introduce.”

Network Edge evaluated the existing solution and sought ways to remedy the situation. They considered products from several vendors to help with Server Load Balancing (SLB) and Application Networking, before recommending deployment of A10 ADCs. A10’s advanced Application Delivery Controllers help organisations such as TCDC to scale and maximise application availability and ensure their networks run at peak efficiency. A10 worked with Network Edge to understand TCDC’s key requirements and develop a proof of concept (POC). The A10 ADC was quickly integrated into the existing network environment. A10’s appliances improve web services availability through SLB, as well as performance optimisation through SSL Offload, HTTP caching and compression. The A10 ADC also optimises security services such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS protection), Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DNS Application Firewall (DAF), and future-proofs TCDC in areas such as multi-tenancy, IPv6 Migration and Virtualisation.

• Paul Johnson said: “Implementation after a proof of concept (POC) and then transitioning into production using the A10 ADC was extremely easy. The A10 interface is highly intuitive and enabled our new infrastructure and services to be deployed quickly and efficiently.”
• Performance benefits were apparent immediately. The average load time of web pages is now five times faster—1.4 seconds per page compared to the previous 7 seconds. With cached web pages on the A10 ADC, the average load time is close to 0.6 seconds.
• Certain critical features were needed immediately, and the expected benefits of deploying these features already are being fully realised by the TCDC. But investment in A10 ADCs also has improved performance in unexpected areas.
• “A10’s unique Application Delivery Partition (ADP) feature has been highly beneficial, allowing us to utilise their device as load-balancer on our LAN, as well as being a perimeter device,” said Shiv Singh, TCDC’s Networking Engineer.
• “We can create logical Layer 3 separation on the appliance for services published in DMZ, WAN, LAN and to the Internet. Each partition has its own routing table, its own group of networks and associated VLANs. A rule change on one LAN partition will not affect the rule changes on other partitions. The A10 technology is a perfect fit.”

• The average load time of web pages is now five times faster—1.4 seconds per page compared to the previous 7 seconds.
• With cached web pages on the A10 ADC, the average load time is close to 0.6 seconds.