Re: Zeus ZXTM?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the power to make poor experiences or issues go away.  I’m sorry you had such a horrible experience with F5 and can certainly see why you would be upset—as well as why you changed vendors.  It really is *not* indicative or our beliefs or values and  I hope we have an opportunity to reprove ourselves with you sometime in the future.  I’m also glad that you’ve found a solution that works for you, your particular needs and at a financial point that makes sense for you.  In the end, that’s all that matters.

 

BTW—I was teasing about the performance difference.  I forgot my J.  So, I apologize if that came across as antagonistic.  It was really meant to validate your comment about paperweights because I thought it was a valid concern with the appliance approach and I know that’s one of the reasons people are looking to software/virtual appliances.  I’m just still not convinced there is a one-size fits all answer; particularly when we start talking about cloud deployments.  I think there is value in the combination of both approaches.

 


KJ (Ken) Salchow, Jr. | Manager, Technical Marketing


D 651.423.1133

M 612.868.12588

P 206.272.5555

F 206.272.5555

 <http://www.f5.com/> www.f5.com

 

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Zak Thompson
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 11:34 AM
To: Load Balancing Mailing List
Subject: Re: [load balancing] Zeus ZXTM?

 

Ok to make things fair our dell R200’s with 4gb ram that run ZXTM were out performing the 6800’s.  We were running v9 code.  Its very frustrating with all the code releases F5puts out and then also TOTALLY recalling software versions and saying.  Oops you shouldn’t of installed it it was just filled with bugs and has been recalled.  Can you really test your code before you guys issue it out and tell customers to update?    

 

I find it very irritating to discover a field engineer come on site, looks at our F5’s and see’s us pushing 700Mbps and says “wow.  You really are pushing that much”.  Yes we buy them because you advertise they can perform 4Gbps.   If you are going to post benchmark results and performance data and tell customers on the phone yeah sure it should be no problem.. It better perform or else we have a 90k paper weight.  And after the fact of all these problems we had NO compassion from our sales rep from f5 about our horrible investment we made.  Why should they?  They got the sale and that’s _all_ that matters.  Horrible support.  After hour support goes to a team in Japan that got back to me hours later on an emergency issue and didn’t get resolved next day until someone else took the ticket over.  We bought our 6800’s  maybe 2 years ago.

 

  So anything above our 1200Mbpsbottleneck was just falling on its face, downloads were horrid.  As far as a dell R200 running zxtm it has performed flawlessly and should be the same specs *roughly* as the F5 device.  F5’s devices could not handle ~1gb file size transfers when we were doing ~1300 req/s  Small data was great, however no matter how we changed it sliced it up large data passing through the F5 devices fell on their face.

 

I once thought F5 was a great device, it was and it probably still is just depending on what you need it for.  But their high price and mentality on business is pretty snoody when it comes to the customer satisfaction level.   We still run some much older F5’s for non critical load balancing.

 

 

Zeus on the other hand is 100% customer satisfaction from what we can see.   Even though my regional guy is gone now He was always fun to chat with and his sales engineer was a great guy as well.   They would always invite us out to lunch whenever they were in town visiting other customers and ops.  And we could always reach his SE any time for questions directly.  

 

At least with the ZXTM software after the initial purchase you just pay for annual support.  Which will save you money down the long road as you upgrade equipment and replace failed devices etc.

 

Zachary A. Thompson

CEO

YellowFiber Networks

703-209-5706 – M

703-763-7001 - O

[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 

http://www.yellowfiber.net <http://www.yellowfiber.net/> 

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kenneth Salchow
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 12:28 PM
To: Load Balancing Mailing List
Subject: Re: [load balancing] Zeus ZXTM?

 

just a couple of comments—again, without knowing the specific situation:

 

dual-core, 2GB of RAM (with unknown port config) vs. dual quads, 32GB of RAM with 10Gb interfaces?  I sure hope there was some performance increase (at least 4x at a minimum).    You don’t mention what version of software, but that hardware platform was announced 4.5 years ago; heck, I was still a field engineer when that came out.

 

Which brings me to your comment about paperweights—you are right that when you invest in a hardware platform, there is sunk costs in the hardware appliance.  But you are glossing over a couple of points that are key to many people consistently willing to do just that:

 

1.       You still invest in hardware—perhaps not as much as a dedicated, purpose-built appliance, but you do still have capitalized hardware costs; and

2.       You have limited availability to use hardware compression and hardware-based SSL offload or other potential solutions.  While there are solutions (at least on the SSL front), this too is additional capitalized hardware costs which either add significantly to the cost of building your own hardware and/or can negatively impact performance; and

3.       Lastly, there is something to be said for having the hardware and software integrated and supported by the same company.  I’m not saying that anyone has bad support, what I’m saying is that—as many PC support companies have learned—it’s near impossible to keep up with all the possible hardware configurations someone might use.  Even if you use the virtual appliance, you now also add a hypervisor which requires investment in licenses as well as training and yet another point of support.

 

So, yes, I agree that you are paying a premium for an appliance.  I also agree that for some people/situations it is not worth it to do so.  But, many people I have talked to have found that there overall savings (when taking into account all asset costs, training, management, etc.) don’t come out nearly as lopsided as it might appear on the surface.  I’d also point out that some of the new chassis-based hardware platforms have a potential for giving customers a best-of-both-worlds solution—a dedicated, purpose built platform that can also provide the upgradability needed to keep up with changing demands and newer technology.

 

Again—every situation is fairly unique—so I’m not saying an appliance is best in every situations—just like I’m not saying that software or virtual images are the best solution in every situation.  I just want to be clear that there ARE situations where the premium is well worth it.

 


KJ (Ken) Salchow, Jr. | Manager, Technical Marketing


D 651.423.1133

M 612.868.12588

P 206.272.5555

F 206.272.5555

 <http://www.f5.com/> www.f5.com

 

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Zak Thompson
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 9:11 AM
To: Load Balancing Mailing List
Subject: Re: [load balancing] Zeus ZXTM?

 

We replaced our F5 6800's for two intel dual quads with 32g ram and 10g ethernet running ZXTM.  F5 was lacking in performance on large file downloads and was having a very very hard time pushing 1+Gbps even with F5's engineers trying to figure out how to make it better.

 

We have been very pleased with Zeus's performance and have been very happy to make the change over to ZXTM and would HIGHLY recommend it.  Your making a software investment which you can move to bigger/better servers and not one into a paperweight since the F5 is a hardware appliance you are limited to the functionality it handles.

 

Cheers,

Zak Thompson

Yellow Fiber Networks

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 8:55 AM
To: Load Balancing Mailing List
Subject: Re: [load balancing] Zeus ZXTM?

 

I tested Zeus ZXTM and it worked well for me, and it can do pretty much everything an F5 LTM will do and had something that had basic iRules functionality.

But a new F5 BIG-IP 1600 is under $20k, so ZXTM won't really save you much money (based on the last time I got prices out of them).

Regards,
Vince


"Julian Grunnell" <[email protected]> 
Sent by: [email protected]

07/08/2009 06:37 AM


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[load balancing] Zeus ZXTM?

 

		




Hi – has anyone any experience, good or bad of using Zeus ZXTMor  ZXTM LB? We almost exclusively use F5 LTM’s at present and have been asked to look at Zeus as an alternative for some setups.

Thanks – Julian.

Julian Grunnell
UNIX Systems Administrator (Leeds)
Webfusion

Tel: 0208 587 7212
Mob: 07803 649593
Web:  <http://www.webfusion.co.uk/> http://www.webfusion.co.uk/_______________________________________________
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