Skip to main content Skip to search
Start Your Free Trial
Blog

3 Benefits of FlexPool

FlexPool Benefits: Allocation Flexibility, Investment Protection and Operational Simplicity

Organizations are moving to the hybrid cloud at a rapid clip – it’s estimated that 70 percent of enterprises have already made the transition to a hybrid model.

Meanwhile, IT admins are adopting software models that enable security application services to be virtualized or run on bare metal. This increases the need for subscription models for software licensing versus the traditional perpetual licenses.

As workloads become more dynamic, IT needs to ensure secure application services are available. And with applications running in on-premise and cloud environments, application services and associated licenses need to match this new consumption model.

Yet, software licenses today tend to be perpetual, instance-based and static with a fixed capacity. This limits their ability to scale. They also involve complex license schemes, meaning an admin could be responsible for managing hundreds to thousands of licenses. These types of licenses are inflexible and can’t port across environments.

Today, A10 introduces FlexPool, a software subscription-based capacity pooling license. FlexPool is a floating license pool that comprises a large and scalable quantity of A10 secure applications services such as Thunder ADC, Thunder CGN and Thunder CFW.

FlexPool is designed for organizations with many applications, many locations or highly dynamic and transitory workloads. Our testing has found FlexPool can be as much as three times as economically efficient when compared to instance-based or perpetual licenses, and it can support up to 4,000 or more applications with one pool of capacity. FlexPool reduces the amount of time it takes to provision licenses from days to seconds when compared to perpetual licenses.

Here’s A10 Senior Product Marketing Manager John Gudmundson explaining the benefits of FlexPool over outdated perpetual licensing models:

FlexPool offers three key benefits

  1. Allocation flexibility: Organizations can dynamically allocate capacity and share the pool as needed, anywhere at any time. This means IT can immediately spin up or provision software instances and these instances can run a highly granular level of bandwidth and can scale up or down as needed for on-demand consumption. This allows companies to align the consumption of application services with the resources available to avoid service disruption.
  2. Investment protection: FlexPool licenses are completely portable across any environment – on-premise, multi-cloud, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. You can put them anywhere. This empowers companies to globally apportion capacity, thus balancing traffic spikes and eliminating the need to overprovision.
  3. Operational simplicity: With FlexPool, customers only managing one central license pool versus hundreds or thousands of complex licenses in perpetual-based schemes. Organizations also have complete visibility; they can monitor usage patterns, generate analytics, get audit trails and more.

FlexPool is available now in one-year or three-year subscriptions and with several capacity pool options, including 10G, 50G, 100G and custom. Gold support and software upgrades are included.

For more information on FlexPool, download the FlexPool data sheet. If you like what you see, check out the free trial