A10 Customer Advisory Committee Meeting [June 2010]

Last month, I attended an A10 customer advisory committee meeting. Was a good discussion involving folks from some pretty large companies. While I can't go into detail on the specifics, I can say that the future looks good for A10. The features they are looking to add will be impressive.

It is also very interesting to listen to the different uses that people have for the AX platform. There are folks with load balancers in front of segments with thousands of hosts in the same layer 2 domain. These folks require sub-second fail over time because every failed session of their web application means that they lost revenue. It really gets you thinking outside of your home environment.

One of the things that I've been impressed with is that A10 is developing some features that take advantage of both the AX platform as well as the device's position in the network. An example of a feature that illustrates this concept and has already been released is the DNS query validation. The AX device can perform analysis of the query coming in to determine if it is malformed. If it is, it can simply discard the query. Having a feature like this will protect a DNS server from a crapflood.

Thinking like this is what makes me love the AX platform and ACOS.