Improving financial services with server load balancing technology

Lee Chen, A10 Networks’ President and CEO, discusses how server load balancers can help financial institutions reduce risk.

FST. Describe how your AX Series server load balancers can help financial institutions reduce risk
LC. It is a fact of life – hardware components can fail and software can crash or malfunction. When a router’s link or a server goes down or a Layer 2 switch crashes, financial institutions’ business applications need to run continuously and unattended. A10’s AX Series server load balancers are designed for High Availability (HA). Our AX Series hardware is carrier-grade with redundant power supplies, removable fan trays and dual hard drives. AX Series’ software provides HA redundancy features for any user topology. Recently, we won a major customer deal with our Layer 2 Hot Standby High Availability feature. When a customer’s uplink connections drop, the uplink devices stop or routers fail, it takes our competitor’s product 20 to 30 seconds to provide failover. Alternatively, the AX Series provides sub-second seamless failover.

FST. How does the AX Series improve financial institutions’ ability to deliver services?
LC. The AX Series has three unique abilities to help financial institutions’ web application delivery: acceleration, optimization and security. For acceleration, the AX Series is really fast. Recently, an independent test from the Tolly Group validates that the AX can sustain Layer 7 performance at 1.5 million transactions per second, which is unparalleled within the industry. For optimization, the AX Series simply provides the best price/performance, the best performance per watt and the best performance per space in the server load balancing industry. Again, the recent Tolly Group report validates our AX Series with over 10 times the price/performance advantage over the market leading vendor.

Finally, our AX Series has many built-in security features such as high performance Denial-of-Services (DoS) protection, Access Control List (ACL) and high-performance secure email features so that financial organizations can rest with ease. Every AX device has hardware-based Secure Socket Layer (SSL) acceleration without any additional charge.

FST. The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol is very popular for the international real-time exchange of finance market information. How does your FIX load balancing feature help financial institutions?
LC. Typically, a FIX client is designated to an individual server and during any failure this process requires a manual intervention to redirect traffic to another server. With FIX load balancing from A10, the advanced load balancing features utilized for other services are also offered for FIX servers. These features include advanced health checks, which constantly check the health of FIX servers. In the event of a failure, traffic is automatically assigned to another server with no user intervention.

FST. How does your Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) feature assist financial institutions?
LC. The traditional use of GSLB was to direct users to the “active” data center. In the event of a data center failure or loss of connectivity, traffic would be directed to a backup facility, which stood dormant until there was a failure. With GSLB from A10, these back-up facilities do not have to stay idle; they can now be used on demand, which reduces the risk of slow performance to a service caused by unplanned increases in application usage.

FST. Does the AX Series include security features that can prevent network attacks to online banking services?
LC. A common attack called a TCP SYN Flood attack sends a large series of connection requests but does not acknowledge the connections. This causes the server queue to fill up and prevents the servers from processing any additional valid connection requests. The AX utilizes hardware-based TCP SYN Flood protection, which replies to each request with a special type of acknowledgement and does not leave a connection in the queue. AX’s hardware-based solution is significantly faster than other software based solutions and leaves 100 percent CPU processing power to handle applications’ data.

FST. What steps have you taken to improve the deployment process so that implementation is quick and seamless?
LC. Ease of use is one key design objective for the AX Series. The AX platform is equipped with multiple management interfaces. One is the popular Cisco-like CLI (command line interface) that can be used both locally and remotely to configure or monitor any aspect of the AX. There is also a GUI (graphical user interface). Any feature can be configured and monitored using point-and-click interfaces, which is extremely intuitive. AX also utilizes a configuration feature knows as “templates,” which allows administrators to configure a feature and all its parameters and then save the template to a library, which can be used for similar configurations thereby shortening the entire management and configuration process.

About Lee Chen
Lee Chen is a recognized pioneer in the Layer 4-7 networking industry. Prior to founding A10 Networks, Chen co-founded Foundry Networks and Centillion Networks. At A10, he has assembled an expert technology team to produce the next generation of networking and security equipment.