A department requiring load balancing or server failover capability will be provided with a dedicated A10 Thunder load balancer instance. All Data Center load balancer instances will be highly available. The load balancer can be placed on the same network as the hosts to be balanced, can be given a new subnet to use for dedicated services, or it can be placed in parallel, with one connection to the protected VLAN and one on the unprotected VLAN, with an existing firewall service to support more complex requirements.
The load balancers are configured as a layer 3 device allowing full content proxy and network address translation (NAT).
Within the Data Center, the appliances will be set up in a redundant configuration, with two load balancers linked through two switches dedicated to providing network services. The load balancers are configured such that a change made on one is automatically propagated to the other. If one of the load balancer units fails, the other will take over automatically.
IST will manage hardware and software upgrades, and will create the initial configuration for a departmental load balancer instance. Department administrators will be responsible for managing their individual instances.