F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. Radware Alteon

There was a need to have the DR environment to be available actively but not to send the traffic unless the production is down The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) priority feature helped achieving it. It was well suited in handling the HTTP headers using polices and iRules. It was less appropriate from the application security perspective in the current version. But after attending the AppWorld 2024, I see a lot of ways to protect the network and the application with several features.

Incentivized

These devices caused more problems for our company than benefits, I would never recommend these to colleagues.

Incentivized

• Does web traffic management very well.
• To allow API's to work with our in house services
• To make intelligent load balancing decisions.

Incentivized

• Time investment in creating Virtual Servers across many LTMs
• Ability to change object names after creation
• Support ability to troublshoot iRUles

Incentivized

• The software web application is beyond terrible, in most of the cases the web was broken or did not have similar functionality the command line interface had.
• The command line interface wasn't a natural looking interface, it was very fumbled and while it ran on Linux, the interface was all menus and sub-menus.
• When enabling different pools for different web services, when a new pool was activated, the old pool connections were all reset instead of allowing HTTP sessions to naturally expire.

Incentivized

As far as I know, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) from F5 is the best and the number of features is unmatched compared to its competitors. The first-time setup is also quick and easy and the product behaves as a full proxy which is rarely seen. The support is good and also the help articles are numerous.

Incentivized

We moved away from Alteon to F5 BigIP LTM and just by swapping out the hardware, we saw 40% speed increase in our applications. Everything else is much improved as well, from the web interface to the command line to the API.

Incentivized

• Negative impact in that it makes it very easy for applications to be spun up but cleanup of old/ unused deployments do not happen causing resources to be consumed unnecessarily
• When used in a multiblade viprion guest, issues with backplane and blade replication causing impact
• Ability to deploy multiple instances helped with network segmentation

Incentivized

• While running on these devices, every release caused many interruptions in service and caused thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

Incentivized