Vorarlberg upgrades to A10 Networks AX series to improve mission critical application delivery

A10 Networks has announced that Vorarlberg, an Austrian state, is using A10 Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) to improve the performance of 40 critical back-end applications.

Vorarlberg is the westernmost federal state of Austria with a population of 373,058 spread across a 140 sq/km, with Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west and Germany to the north. The region has a flourishing textile and clothing industry alongside a broad agricultural base. The surrounding Lake Constance area is home to many renowned educational facilities and colleges, with an inter-regional focus including the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences.

As part of a process to streamline the delivery and support of ICT for public sector organisations across the region, Vorarlberg established Vorarlberger Informatik- und Telekommunikationsdienstleistungsgesellschaft mbH (Vorarlberg computer science and telecommunications services mbH / VTG), an organisation that is 95 percent owned by the State of Vorarlberg and five percent owned by the municipality computer science GmbH. VTG is responsible for ICT delivery including underlying networks and critical applications to educational, healthcare and public administration organisations across the state. VTG has over 1,700 servers under management and 600 active network elements as part of a 24/7 managed service.

In 2013, following continual growth of its ICT services, senior managers at VTG felt that its legacy Brocade ServerIron Load balancing solution was simply unable to cope with future demands. The product was also reaching its End-of-Life in terms of support, prompting managers to issue an RFP to five prospective vendors to replace the solution. As Peter Oliver, Senior System Engineer for VTG explains, “We got down to a short list of three suppliers who we invited for further technical examination and it was clear based on features, performance and price that A10 Networks was a clear winner.”

With support from A10, engineers from VTG deployed a pair of A10 Networks AX3400 appliances in a high availability active / active configuration. Since installation, VTG have now extended application acceleration, availability and security features to over 40 backend systems used by public sector organisations across the state. “The project has been a success and we have more than enough capacity to add more services to the A10 platform as we need,” says Peter.

A10’s line of high-performance ADCs enable customer applications to be highly available, accelerated and secure, delivering performance scalability up to 115 Gbps. A10 ADCs are built upon A10's Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®) platform, using a Symmetric Scalable Multi-Core Processing (SSMP) software architecture that delivers high performance options for dedicated, hosted or cloud data centers.