New BIG-IP® application
delivery solutions, BIG-IQ™ management offerings, and
flexible pricing options promote efficient scaling and services
orchestration for all IT environments
F5 Networks, Inc.:
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- New F5 offerings enhance the delivery
of Software Defined Application Services™ (SDAS™) to provide
optimization, security, reliability, and management capabilities
for all applications across any data center or cloud
infrastructure.
- F5’s Synthesis architecture combines
complementary technologies to form a high-performance services
fabric, making it easier for customers to intelligently orchestrate
valuable device, application, and network services, and scale IT
solutions with a variety of virtual and physical solutions.
- New functionality gives F5 solutions
the broadest set of application services on the market, aimed at
improving application service velocity, adding IT agility, reducing
TCO, and deploying flexible technologies that enable current
investments to pay dividends in the future.
F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) announced today new offerings that
enhance the benefits of the F5 Synthesis™ architecture model. F5®
technologies are designed to help organizations quickly deploy
applications and streamline the mix of services needed to ensure
success for security, data center, cloud, and mobility initiatives.
F5’s broad solution portfolio enables customers to seamlessly scale
environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Specifically, F5 is announcing:
- New BIG-IP® version 11.5 software for
enhanced application delivery services and security
- The industry’s most capable virtual
solutions (now with throughput levels of 25 Mbps to 10 Gbps) to
support hybrid and virtual appliance deployments across the
broadest set of hypervisors
- Expanded VIPRION® offerings, with the
new 2250 performance blade providing the highest multi-tenant
density in its class, efficient consolidation of application
services, and dynamic resource scaling with no operational
disruption
- BIG-IQ™ version 4.2 software for
simplified management and comprehensive orchestration, and the new
BIG-IQ Device solution that provides enhanced configuration
capabilities for physical and virtual BIG-IP devices
- Network virtualization capabilities
that give F5 the broadest range of support for SDN technologies in
the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market, including full
traffic management and gateway support for Microsoft Windows Server
Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV), and others
- Updated licensing and pricing options,
including an expanded presence in the AWS Marketplace for enhanced
deployment flexibility
Building on the first F5 Synthesis launch in late 2013, these
offerings expand F5’s open and extensible framework to elegantly
combine reliability, security, and optimization capabilities, among
other valuable application services. To reinforce the company’s
vision, F5 Synthesis provides a growing library of reference
architectures that center on specific solutions for common business
challenges. These reference architectures provide prescriptive
deployment guidance for F5 technologies, accelerating time to
market by enabling rapid service implementation through a suite of
Software Defined Application Services™ (SDAS™).
Earlier this month, a new F5 reference architecture for VMware
Horizon View was announced. F5 will also introduce additional
reference architectures aimed at the security and service provider
markets in line with activities around the upcoming RSA and Mobile
World Congress events.
KEY BENEFITS
To comprehensively support applications, SDAS provide critical
layer 4-7 capabilities, delivering a powerful complement to
organizations’ existing layer 2-3 network and compute-focused
initiatives such as SDN, with a special focus on enabling Software
Defined Data Centers. Only F5 provides intelligent programmability,
visibility, and extensibility for application services through
technologies like iRules®, iControl®, iApps®, iCall™, iHealth®, and
REST APIs. In addition, F5 Global Services offerings facilitate the
implementation, maintenance, and optimization of customers’
solutions to maximize the value of F5 deployments.
Enhanced Technology Capabilities
through a Growing Partner Ecosystem
F5’s new solutions further enable a growing ecosystem of
technology partners to collaborate on holistic, integrated
provisioning and orchestration systems that address service
velocity requirements across compute, network, and application
resources.
“Like Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), F5
Synthesis is focused on efficiently delivering applications by
taking a fabric-based approach to networking and services
architectures. With our growing technology partnership, we see
many opportunities to combine the capabilities of Cisco ACI with
F5’s layer 4-7 application services to automate and centrally
orchestrate ADC-enabled data centers. Currently, both companies are
jointly developing Cisco Validated Design (CVD) frameworks around
Cisco ACI that take advantage of F5 Synthesis offerings and
illustrate the customer benefits of deploying ACI and Cisco
APIC controllers in concert with F5 BIG-IP physical and virtual
appliances.”
Soni Jiandani, SVP, Marketing, Cisco
“Aligned with Microsoft’s datacenter transformation approach, F5
Synthesis aims to blend hardware, software, and services into
offerings that are quick to deploy and easy to manage. Through
jointly engineered integration, F5 delivers solutions that embrace
and extend Microsoft’s SDN offering with Hyper-V Network
Virtualization and Microsoft System Center, including the addition
of management, orchestration, and monitoring capabilities. Looking
forward, we see F5 as well positioned to further enhance the
capabilities of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure offerings to
deliver great agility and flexibility to our joint customers.”
Mike Schutz, General Manager, Windows Server, Management and
Appliances Marketing, Microsoft
Application-Driven Elasticity with F5’s
High-Performance Services Fabric
F5 application services take advantage of an all-active and
multi-tenant services fabric to combine the performance, security,
and availability gains of many technologies in a scalable,
easy-to-manage fashion. The combination of performance, scale, and
multi-tenant capabilities offered by F5 is unmatched by
competitors. F5 solutions enable device-based and virtual resources
to be shared between all applications—removing the limitation of
tying specific hardware to the needs of only a few priority apps.
Standardizing on F5 platforms helps organizations effectively
deploy application service topologies in a reliable, consistent
manner in both data center and cloud environments. Customers can
choose the F5 solutions, third-party hypervisors, and cloud
resources that will best suit their needs, while maximizing
infrastructure resilience and flexibility.
With F5’s new offerings, customers gain improved application
performance through:
- Unparalleled application fluency –
Advanced protocol handling, such as MPTCP and mobile TCP
optimization, plus application profiles for MS SQL, FIX, and
BER/DER encoding capabilities
- Optimized application delivery – WebP
conversion feature for 26% smaller images and a per-application
dedicated cache leveraging HTML5 Local Storage capabilities
- The industry’s broadest hypervisor
support – Including support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V,
VMware ESXi 5.5, Citrix Xen 6.2 and Community Xen 4.2, KVM on Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, CentOS 6.4, Ubuntu 13.04, and Debian
7.1
- SSD-enabled appliances and blades –
Increased vADC guest density (over 2x competitors’ solutions) and
improved performance to further benefit application services
- Simplified DNS deployment capabilities
– Efficient configuration management and optimized DNS
resolving
Intelligent Services Orchestration to
Better Manage Application Resources
With the number of enterprise applications growing rapidly,
complexity around scalability, consolidation, security, and
performance can be a roadblock for the efficient orchestration of
services. As a management solution for F5’s high-performance
services fabric, BIG-IQ enables customers to simply configure and
automate how services respond to changing business needs and
conditions. BIG-IQ solutions can spin virtual ADCs up and down on
demand, as applications and users require more or less resources.
F5’s new BIG-IQ technologies provide improved services
orchestration with automation, lifecycle management, and dynamic
provisioning capabilities for services in data center, cloud, and
hybrid environments. Moreover, F5’s services fabric can be deployed
with adjacent technologies from F5’s growing ecosystem of partners
like AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, and others.
Highlights of F5’s enhancements for services orchestration and
management include:
- BIG-IQ Cloud – Cloud connector
capabilities now enable federation of BIG-IP solutions across data
centers and clouds supported by AWS, VMware, and OpenStack
technologies
- BIG-IQ Security – Simplified firewall
policy management with stronger security and automation features
saves time and minimizes the chance of manual configuration
errors
- New BIG-IQ Device – Enhanced management
and monitoring capabilities for BIG-IP deployments with automated
discovery, licensing, inventory, and UCS backup and restore
capabilities
Simplified Business Models to Reduce
Costs and Complexity
Today’s organizations seek elegant ways to deploy and scale a
broad set of physical, virtual, and cloud-based solutions without
sacrificing future flexibility. F5® technologies provide customers
with a range of simplified purchasing and deployment options, all
designed to scale. This enables customers to move from managing
traditional reliability models to a strategic, services-based
approach that focuses on application-level service provisioning,
automation, and orchestration to better align application services
with business and user expectations.
New ways F5 is making it easier for customers to deploy and
scale impactful technologies include:
- Expanded utility billing options on the
AWS Marketplace – F5 customers can deliver application services in
the cloud while paying only for the resources they use
- Streamlined license management for F5
Virtual Edition (VE) license pools – BIG-IP VEs can be
provisioned/deprovisioned as needed, with BIG-IQ able to manage
licenses for all VEs in a given pool
- Integrated deployment options for
BIG-IP/ScaleN™, BIG-IQ, and F5’s Good, Better, Best tiered
licensing offerings – The industry’s most scalable and flexible
platforms reduce the cost of deploying multiple application
services without compromise
ADDITIONAL QUOTES
“F5 Synthesis enables intelligent application services to better
support technologies throughout the IT infrastructure. With the
BIG-IP platform and simplified ‘Best’ tiering of F5 offerings,
we’ve been able to add new services—including security and disaster
recovery capabilities—in a straightforward, cost-effective manner.
F5’s partnership ecosystem includes notable technology vendors,
giving the company the expertise to provide guidance on how to
comprehensively architect systems.”
Ronaldo M�ntmann, Director of Technology and Infrastructure,
Broward Health
“With enhancements across our portfolio, we’re making it easier
for organizations to deliver seamless application services without
relying on point solutions or isolated resources to support the
applications that drive business results. Because F5’s integrated
security, acceleration, and availability capabilities can be
implemented across a flexible services fabric, customers can
orchestrate and tailor their systems to efficiently support all
types of IT deployments.”
Manny Rivelo, EVP of Strategic Solutions, F5
SUPPORTING RESOURCES
- F5 Synthesis – Main Page
- F5 Synthesis: Fast, Fluent and Flexible
– DevCentral Blog Post
- Easy DNS – DevCentral Blog Post
AVAILABILITY AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
The F5 solutions mentioned in this announcement are generally
available now, with the exception of SSD-enabled BIG-IP appliances,
which will be available in the first quarter of calendar year 2014.
The new BIG-IQ Device offering can be deployed via software or as a
hardware-based management solution, with the BIG-IQ 7000 platform.
Please contact a local F5 sales office for additional information
and product availability in specific countries. New F5 solutions
for AWS will be added to the AWS Marketplace on an ongoing
basis.
ABOUT F5
F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) provides solutions for an application world.
F5 helps organizations seamlessly scale cloud, data center, and
software defined networking (SDN) deployments to successfully
deliver applications to anyone, anywhere, at any time. F5 solutions
broaden the reach of IT through an open, extensible framework and a
rich partner ecosystem of leading technology and data center
orchestration vendors. This approach lets customers pursue the
infrastructure model that best fits their needs over time. The
world’s largest businesses, service providers, government entities,
and consumer brands rely on F5 to stay ahead of cloud, security,
and mobility trends. For more information, go to f5.com.
You can also follow @f5networks on Twitter or visit us on
Facebook for more information about F5, its partners, and
technology.
F5, F5 Synthesis, Software Defined Application Services, SDAS,
BIG-IP, BIG-IQ, VIPRION, iRules, iControl, iCall, iApps, iHealth,
ScaleN, and DevCentral are trademarks or service marks of F5
Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product
and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective
owners.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements
relating to future events or future financial performance that
involve risks and uncertainties. Such statements can be identified
by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans,"
"anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or
"continue," or the negative of such terms or comparable terms.
These statements are only predictions and actual results could
differ materially from those anticipated in these statements based
upon a number of factors including those identified in the
company's filings with the SEC.
F5 NetworksAlane Moran, 206-272-6850a.moran@f5.comorWaggener
Edstrom WorldwideAshley Paula,
415-547-7024apaula@waggeneredstrom.com
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