McMaster University in Canada Selects A10's AX Advanced Traffic Managers

 

McMaster University, located in Ontario, Canada has reportedly deployed A10's AX Series Advanced Traffic Managers to ensure better performance of its Blackboard (News - Alert) online education learning.

 

McMaster University has a student population of 23,000, and more than 145,000 alumni in 128 countries. University utilises the latest online technology and recently upgraded to Blackboard Academic Suite 8 and Blackboard Vista 8 for comprehensive e-Learning, course and student management. The AX Series as McMaster's Application Delivery Controller platform helps to accelerate, load balance and solve key functional issues regarding the online applications.

 

"We researched the leading Application Delivery Controller solutions on the market and were impressed to learn we could deploy A10's AX Series for the most superior performance at the best price," said Herman Poon, systems administrator at McMaster University.

 

He said, "The AX Series is particularly useful as it can load balance the application server clusters within the two Blackboard applications. I recommend A10's AX Series as a key component for online learning infrastructures."

 

University is now able to perform Web server load balancing across the Blackboard application servers using the AX Series solution. It is deployed to Layer 7 deep packet inspection for added security and ASIC SSL acceleration to off-load compute intensive functions for performance advantages. The key distinguishing AX Series feature was internal load balancing between the Blackboard Academic Suite and Vista application cluster servers for internal communication.

 

AX series offers reliability and redundancy through comprehensive application-layer health checks and load-balancing algorithms, while running on a platform with carrier-grade hardware components. It additional features include Layer 4-7 features and performance, SSL acceleration, hardware compression and RAM Caching at a cost-effective price.

 

"We are proud that McMaster University is able to uniquely increase availability and performance for its Blackboard online learning management system with the help of our AX Series," said Lee Chen, founder and CEO of A10 Networks (News - Alert).

 

He said the AX Series provides a competitive advantage for the rapidly growing online education market by solving key implementation issues and delivering faster, better and greener application delivery solutions.