Carrier Grade NAT

Tue Jul 29 18:35:26 UTC 2014

Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> writes:

> I searched carrier grade NAT in google, and A10 came up a lot. I thought they
> just had good SEO going on, but it seems they have a good product as well!
> Does A10 offer DHCP, DNS, and IPAM solutions as well? You really need all 4 to
> handle carrier grade NAT on an access network right? 
>

They don't have an IPAM built in.  IPAMs are usually a back office
thing.  It's a deeply personal choice usually made by the very same
monkey in your organization responsible for managing IP allocations.

You can toss IP pool management (in your case, DHCP) at your A10s, but I
don't.

You can also do some interesting things with DNS on the boxes if you
have a software load that supports load balancing.  But you don't need
that for NAT.  Nor is it wise to put all your eggs into one magical
packet-routing basket.

-Daniel