F5 Solutions Accelerate Service Provider Transition to IoT, 5G, and NFV Technologies
February 21 2018 - 4:00AM
Business Wire
Key innovations and capabilities in
spotlight at Mobile World Congress
F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) is announcing a range of Internet of
Things (IoT), 5G, and NFV solutions and capabilities ahead of next
week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). The solutions are specifically
designed to help service providers run faster, smarter, and safer
as they incorporate new technologies. In particular, F5 offerings
address challenges related to soaring data traffic from the
emergence of 5G and the growing presence of consumer and commercial
IoT.
“Service providers are increasingly disaggregating hardware and
software in their networks and embracing virtualization and
automation,” said Kara Sprague, Senior Vice President and General
Manager of the Application Delivery Controller business unit at F5
Networks. “F5’s solutions are specifically designed with this
future state in mind—consolidating and optimizing network
functions, reducing total cost of ownership, and facilitating
multi-layered end-to-end security that spans devices, networks, and
applications.”
The news comes as service providers worldwide are fast adapting
to new digital realities. According to F5’s recent 2018 State of
Application Delivery report, more than half of surveyed service
providers (55%) believe IoT is the most strategically important
trend in the next two to five years. As many as 83% said they had
digital transformation projects in place, while 56% of these
projects have already influenced greater IT system and process
automation and orchestration.
F5’s new service provider solutions include the global launch of
the BIG-IP® i15000 Series hardware, delivering high-end performance
for security and services in a compact form factor (2
RU). With the highest available layer 4 throughput of any
comparable application delivery appliance, the i15000 enables
consolidation of multiple services on a single device—including
load balancing, TCP/IP optimization, traffic steering, DDoS, CGNAT,
DNS, and firewall capabilities—in the Gi LAN or data center.
In addition, F5 is reducing the risk of the move to 5G through
new Enterprise Licensing Agreements and virtual edition
subscription options. It is also rolling out an iSeries Cloud-Ready
offer, enabling customers to leverage investments that they are
making today for changing needs over time.
Other solutions set to feature prominently at MWC 2018
include:
- High-performance virtual
editions: F5 virtual editions (VEs) now include support for up
to 24 vCPUs (previously 16) and NIC Teaming with SR-IOV, allowing
service providers to maximize performance and lower costs in cloud
and NFV environments.
- Device-aware IoT firewall: F5’s
new device- and subscriber-aware IoT firewall enables mobile
operators to manage and control security policies via the Gi LAN on
a per IoT device basis. Service providers can now use a single IoT
access point name (APN) to aggregate a wide variety of use cases,
avoiding network redesigns and simplifying service rollout.
- GTP (GPRS Tunneling Protocol)
Session Director: One of the important characteristics of 5G
architecture is an ability to ‘slice’ the network into different
segments—all the way from the radio network to the core—and F5’s
GTP Session Director can deliver mobile core network slicing
capabilities based on locally configured policies. The solution
gives mobile operators better control over how subscriber sessions
are distributed over mobile core elements, which is particularly
useful for managing IoT and MVNO business solutions.
- IoT MQTT traffic management and
security: F5 is also announcing new capabilities for SSL
offloading, MQTT message validation, MQTT message transformation,
and intelligent MQTT load balancing. The F5 solution helps service
providers and enterprises scale and secure their IoT brokers,
platforms, and applications.
- Behavioral DDoS detection and
mitigation: F5 is launching new solutions featuring
self-learning behavioral DDoS mitigation techniques, leveraging
artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for both L4
and L7 DDoS profiles. This significantly simplifies DDoS
configurations. In addition, F5 has established strong partnerships
with Flowmon Networks and Genie Networks to complement its powerful
inline L4-L7 DDoS mitigation solutions with an out-of-path
NetFlow-based DDoS detection engine. The combined solution is a
powerful end-to-end DDoS offering that protects service providers
against everything from volumetric brute force attacks to highly
sophisticated application layer attacks.
- Anti-bot mobile SDK: New
capabilities extend the existing Proactive Bot Defense solution for
web and APIs with an SDK for native mobile apps. This ensures that
only humans (using a real mobile device with a valid mobile app)
can access mobile app APIs, and protects against bot exploits.
In other developments, F5 has been confirmed as a member of Tech
Mahindra’s VNF-Xchange. VNF-Xchange is a vendor-neutral platform
that provides a reference environment for Virtual Network Function
(VNF) design, VNF stack, and VNF performance validation. Designed
to accelerate the communications industry’s adoption of Network
Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN),
it provides a platform to validate VNFs, the components of the NFV
reference architecture, and the end-to-end solutions, use cases,
and network services that they enable.
You can find F5 next week at Mobile World Congress in Hall 5,
Booth G11.
Additional Resources
- F5 Service Provider Solutions
- The State of Application Delivery
Report 2018: Service Provider Edition
- Perspectives on Multi-Access Edge
Computing and the BIG-IP i15000 Series – F5 blog post
- IoT Infrastructure, Empowered by F5’s
IoT Solution – F5 blog post
About F5
F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) makes apps go faster, smarter, and safer for
the world’s largest businesses, service providers, governments, and
consumer brands. F5 delivers cloud and security solutions that
enable organizations to embrace the application infrastructure they
choose without sacrificing speed and control. For more information,
go to f5.com. You can also follow @f5networks on
Twitter or visit us
on LinkedIn and Facebook for more information
about F5, its partners, and technologies.
F5, BIG-IP, and iSeries 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.
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version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180221005393/en/
F5 NetworksNathan Misner, 206-272-7494n.misner@f5.comorWE
CommunicationsHolly Lancaster,
415-547-7054hluka@we-worldwide.com
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