F5’s reference architectures and solutions
enable service providers to optimize, secure, and monetize their
mobile networks
F5 Networks (NASDAQ:FFIV) announced today offerings and
reference architectures that extend its F5 Synthesis™ framework and
bring new benefits to service providers. F5 will be showcasing
these reference architectures and demonstrating the benefits of its
service provider offerings at Mobile World Congress, taking place
next week in Barcelona.
F5 Synthesis provides an elastic services platform to help
service providers effectively scale their networks and realize the
benefits of emerging technologies such as Network Functions
Virtualization (NFV) by delivering Software Defined Application
Services™ (SDAS™). SDAS leverage F5’s fabric-based approach by
efficiently and intelligently combining virtualization,
scalability, programmability, orchestration, and other
capabilities.
The F5 Synthesis vision leverages core F5 technologies—including
those announced earlier this week—and enhanced service provider
solutions focused on the data, signaling, and application planes to
further enable the secure, optimized, and orchestrated delivery of
application services. F5 helps service providers adopt
service-driven business practices, empowered by policy, subscriber
identity, Diameter signaling, and other context- and
application-aware solutions. Moreover, by delivering services in an
efficient, unified manner, innovative service provider products aid
organizations in managing and monetizing the way services are
introduced to the market.
As an architectural framework, F5 Synthesis:
- Combines physical, virtual, and
cloud-based deployments to form a unified, elastic high-performance
services fabric. This enables more efficient network architectures
for service providers and an optimized migration path to advanced
LTE services and emerging technologies like NFV.
- Provides agile, orchestrated
application service creation and automation capabilities through
the dynamic programmability of SDAS via open REST-based APIs,
allowing integration with third-party management and orchestration
systems.
- Offers F5 application services with
flexible licensing models to make it cost-effective for service
providers to extend valuable services for all applications on
demand, with the agile technology fabric scaling as needed.
- Enables dynamic, multilayer security
across networks, applications, and devices.
- Delivers advanced “application-driven”
capabilities, service experiences, and improved economics for
service providers by significantly reducing TCO for critical
services and accelerating the delivery of revenue-generating
VAS.1
- Aligns and complies with current and
developing industry practices. F5 is supportive of standards and
guidance affecting service providers, including IETF, 3GPP, GSMA,
ETSI NFV, and SDN-related standards such as ONF.
- Supplies service provider-focused
reference architectures that deliver prescriptive guidance on how
to address evolving business challenges.
KEY BENEFITS
New F5 technologies and solutions continue to augment the
company’s traffic and signaling management solutions portfolio,
enabling service providers to cost-effectively build and scale
their networks, achieve high service velocity and quality of
experience for customers, and further monetize the network by
introducing innovative services and business models. The unified F5
Synthesis architectural framework transforms the economics,
experience, and enablement of application services for service
providers by:
- Unleashing Broadband Services for
Optimum Performance – F5 is the leading vendor in providing
intelligent service chaining, dynamic policy enforcement, Diameter
routing and interworking, and DNS functionality to enable new
services and business models, and enhance mobile broadband
capabilities.
- Enabling Multilayer Security for
Maximum Protection – To support more flexible capabilities, LTE
networks are inherently less secure than their 3G and 2G
predecessors. This can open up mobile networks to a greater number
of significant threats, while mobile operators are increasingly
being expected to offer enhanced protection for users, network, and
applications in concert. F5’s security solutions are designed to
protect end-user devices, networks, and cloud deployments with
industry-leading performance and scale.
- Delivering Future-Proof Scale and
Extensibility for Ultimate Value – F5 gives organizations a
multiservice platform that provides important network services,
such as security, policy enforcement, local DNS, IPv6 migration,
and content filtering, with additional granular control over
traffic policies and steering provided by programmable iRules®
capabilities. F5 delivers unrivaled scale and extensibility to
offer further investment protection looking forward.
- Providing Integration Points with an
Ecosystem of Technology Partners – F5’s comprehensive
programmability and APIs provide enhanced opportunities for
technology partners to collaborate on joint offerings and
interoperability. F5 solutions have undergone extensive evaluation
to promote seamless integration with technology partners in the
next-generation service provider ecosystem.
DEPLOYMENT GUIDANCE WITH SERVICE PROVIDER-FOCUSED REFERENCE
ARCHITECTURES
As a complement to its Synthesis framework, F5 provides a
growing library of reference architectures designed to help service
providers address some of the industry’s most pervasive challenges.
Individual reference architectures provide prescriptive guidance
focused on efficiently deploying SDAS to achieve a specific
business purpose.
F5 reference architectures designed for service providers
include:
- S/Gi Network Simplification – The F5
solution simplifies S/Gi design and operations while also offering
advanced content- and subscriber-aware features. Service providers
can consolidate multiple services such as advanced firewall
solutions, DNS, IPv6 carrier-grade NAT migration, policy
enforcement, and intelligent traffic steering to enable dynamic
service function chaining.
- Security for Service Providers –
Dynamic, intelligent security is implemented at the network,
session, and application layers, with centralized command and
distributed control. F5’s unified service delivery platform offers
unmatched scalability, capacity, and performance to simplify
security architectures and reduce TCO.
- LTE Roaming – A Diameter signaling
solution seamlessly enables roaming from LTE systems in a secure
manner. F5’s LTE Roaming solution uses an advanced Diameter Edge
Agent (DEA) for high-performance subscriber- and context-awareness
for operators and IPX providers while delivering enhanced quality
of experience for subscribers.
- Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
– F5’s solution for NFV architectures helps leverage the benefits
of cloud and SDN within the service provider network environment.
In addition to delivering capabilities such as load balancing and
global server load balancing that are essential for NFV to succeed,
F5 technologies provide a unified, orchestrated environment to
realize the full benefits of a virtualized service
infrastructure.
SUPPORTING QUOTES
“S/Gi network simplification, LTE roaming, voice over LTE,
security, and NFV are very important topics for service providers
to look at over the next few years in considering their
next-generation mobile network deployments. We are pleased to see
F5 Synthesis addressing important issues within the industry.”Vic
McClelland, Managing Director of Networks, Optus
“As mobile operators continue to deploy LTE (4G) and look
further towards 5G networks, scaling and securing the data,
signaling, and application planes become increasingly important. F5
Synthesis binds these three realms to provide an architectural
framework to address critical issues for mobile operators.”Dimitris
Mavrakis, Principal Analyst, Telecoms & Media, Informa
“Service providers are going through a fundamental architectural
shift to SDN and NFV, which increases the importance of automating
the scalability, security, virtualization, and programmability of
their networks. In our view, F5 is the first in the industry to
focus this shift on the mobile broadband segment across the data,
signaling, and application planes, with the aim of helping
providers with flexible scaling and rapid service introductions. We
believe that service providers will want to look at how F5 software
can help them develop new service and business models that will
increase their ability to monetize mobile broadband.”Michael
Howard, Principal Analyst, Infonetics Research
“Service providers have traditionally deployed many stateful
session-based devices on their S/Gi network, which are inherently
not high capacity or are very expensive to scale to sufficient
levels to meet growing bandwidth demands of 4G/LTE and 5G/Advanced
LTE networks. With F5’s S/Gi network simplification solution,
service providers can consolidate these disparate functions into
one platform and scale to meet future bandwidth demands, in turn
reducing TCO by 36 percent over five years compared to their
traditional approach.”Dr. Ray Mota, Managing Partner, ACG
Research
“The explosive growth of always-connected devices running
thousands of applications is requiring service providers to rethink
how services are offered, scaled, and monetized. Virtualization and
orchestration within a flexible architectural framework will become
increasingly important as service providers look to build seamless
Application Delivery Networks.”Patrick Donegan, Senior Analyst,
Heavy Reading
“Changes in the service provider market are being driven by the
desire for services that better address new economic models and
customers’ evolving interests. The F5 Synthesis framework provides
a unified technology fabric and intelligent services orchestration,
enabling service providers to accelerate the transition from just
providing connectivity to delivering enhanced, differentiated
mobile experiences for subscribers.”Dr. Mallik Tatipamula, VP of
Service Provider and Cloud Solutions, F5 Networks
F5 AT MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS
F5 will be exhibiting its service provider technologies in Hall
5, Stand 5G11, at this year’s Mobile World Congress event, taking
place February 24–27 in Barcelona. In addition, the F5 Traffix™
Signaling Delivery Controller™ has been shortlisted for recognition
in the Best Mobile Infrastructure segment of the Global Mobile
Awards 2014, presented at the event.
SUPPORTING RESOURCES
- F5 Synthesis – Main Page
- F5 Synthesis for Service Providers:
Scaling in Three Dimensions – DevCentral Blog Post
- Business Case for S/Gi Network
Simplification – ACG White Paper
AVAILABILITY
The F5 solutions and reference architectures mentioned in this
announcement are generally available now. Please contact a local F5
sales office for product availability in specific countries.
[1] ACG Research, Business Case for S/Gi Network Simplification,
February 2014
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 and @F5CSP on Twitter or visit
us on Facebook for more information about F5, its partners, and
technology.
F5, F5 Synthesis, Software Defined Application Services, SDAS,
Traffix, Signaling Delivery Controller, iRules, 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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