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A10 Networks (News - Alert), specializing in Application Delivery solutions, announced a firmware upgrade for its EX Series product family with version 3.0. The EX Series is an appliance which combines bandwidth management and quality of service or QoS, link load balancing and network monitoring with granular application and user visibility.

Organizations can optimize and secure their networks using the EX Series. It will help them understand the implication of network traffic at the application and user level and apply traffic policies to enforce network utilization. It also increases the reliability factor through the use of application bandwidth prioritization and optimized use of multiple links.

The EX Series can be incorporated into a network without any network changes to provide instant visibility into applications, said company officials.

“We had a pair of Packeteer (News - Alert) PacketShapers but they could not handle our 500 Mb connection. After deploying EX Series 3.0 we’ve had no issues whatsoever,” said Todd Marsh, Principal Network Engineer for Bentley University. “The reporting capabilities are head and shoulders above the competition, A10 support is responsive and easy to work with and we have much more granular control and visibility of our network.”

EX Series 3.0 offers many new ways to identify and prevent bandwidth misuse. It also provides the traditional QoS policies which were present in earlier versions. The enhancements included in version 3.0 are based on automatic load aware shaping and classification technology.

The features allow dynamic policy adjustment based on bandwidth usage which is better than static policies. It offers a heuristic approach to identify abusers and deal with them proactively. The new version includes custom protocol signatures leveraging aFleX, the high-performance Layer 7 scripting tool which was available only in A10’s flagship AX Series Application Delivery Controllers.

In a release Dennis Oshiba, Director of Engineering and Product Management for EX Series said, “A common problem in modern networks today is the uncontrolled use of high bandwidth consuming applications such as video, file sharing and online games that over utilize network resources and halt mission-critical application usage.”

“Our EX Series 3.0 expands on innovative techniques to identify network traffic, giving more power to IT professionals with simple to use and granular reporting to effectively control bandwidth usage,” Oshiba said.

Company officials said that the reporting functionality in the new version allows viewing of customized PDF, HTML or XML reports of specific applications, subnets, VLANs or interfaces of interest besides increasing network visibility with packet distribution and connection-based graphs.