F5 Broadens Platform Offerings with New Virtual and Hardware-Based Application Delivery Controllers

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced new Application Delivery Controller platforms, extending its award-winning BIG-IP^® product family. F5 is offering a new high-end appliance series with the BIG-IP 11050 platform and a new 8950 hardware appliance featuring higher throughput and enhanced layer 4 performance. In addition, F5 is delivering production and lab versions of its virtual appliance, BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager^™ (LTM^®) Virtual Edition (VE). Together, F5’s physical and virtual ADC solutions provide enterprises and service providers with greater flexibility, offering a hybrid approach to architecting an adaptable and highly scalable application delivery network.

"There are architectural challenges associated with virtualizing various Application Delivery Controllers, but the opportunities and benefits for customers are significant,” said Joe Skorupa, Research VP of Data Center Networking & Communications at Gartner. "With physical, virtual, and hybrid deployment options for ADCs, customers gain the flexibility to cost-effectively support scalable application delivery while continuing to leverage their existing infrastructure and investments.”

Details

The addition of these new hardware platforms and BIG-IP LTM VE improves F5’s ability to provide the foundations of a flexible ADN architecture and support the company’s vision for enterprise cloud architecture. With these agile infrastructure components, organizations can implement a framework to deliver services dynamically as application and network conditions change.

The F5^® TMOS^® architecture means that all BIG-IP appliances—physical and virtual—can leverage the flexible capabilities of the iRules^® programming language and iControl^® API, as well as the resources from the company’s DevCentral^™ community. With these powerful, unified technologies, customers can achieve comprehensive visibility and control over their application delivery environments.

BIG-IP 8950 & 11050 Hardware Helps Customers Meet Growing Throughput Demands

• The new platforms support high throughput levels to meet the application delivery needs of service providers and organizations that put a premium on transactions per second, such as financial institutions. The BIG-IP 8950 platform features a throughput level of 20 Gbps, while the 11050 boasts 42 Gbps.
• The solutions support 10 Gb Ethernet connectivity to help bandwidth-conscious customers deliver enhanced application services. The platforms provide ideal solutions for customers that have configured their data centers around 10GE or are currently planning to upgrade their infrastructure.
• With the 8950 and 11050 platforms, customers have the ability to incorporate additional application services (acceleration, high availability, application security, etc.), as their business needs evolve. Because these capabilities can be added to the existing ADN hardware platform, F5 solutions offer both enhanced functionality and optimum performance.

BIG-IP LTM VE Improves ADC Scalability and Simplifies Solution Deployment

• Virtual ADCs can be rapidly deployed and scaled to support applications as resources are needed. In addition, cloud providers can leverage virtual ADCs to apply specific application policies on a per-customer basis to support individual organizations’ business priorities.
• BIG-IP LTM VE provides improved evaluation, development, integration, QA, and staging for application delivery policies and deployments. By enabling customers to deploy a virtual BIG-IP device in a testing lab, customers can conveniently test how applications and networks will respond in a production environment. This capability also enables customers to evaluate the addition of other ADC services such as SSL offloading, caching, and compression, and seamlessly transfer from testing scenarios into production.
• BIG-IP LTM VE will be available in a full production version and a non-production lab version, as well as the previously announced trial. The full production version features variable throughput options up to 1Gbps. The lab version enables in-depth testing, and is best suited for efforts around application development, test, QA, and other non-production scenarios.
• Unlike other virtualized application delivery offerings, BIG-IP LTM VE is part of a comprehensive application delivery architecture platform. This means that it has been designed to operate in tight integration with F5’s broad product portfolio, as well as support solutions from other leading virtualization companies such as VMware.

Additional Quotes

"For many customers, the ideal application delivery environment will leverage both physical and virtual Application Delivery Controllers,” said Jason Needham, Sr. Director of Product Management. "With a hybrid approach, customers can leverage the flexibility and adaptability of virtual appliances, while continuing to support high-throughput application workloads and complex infrastructure requirements with physical ADCs. F5 is committed to offering the flexibility enterprises, service providers, and other organizations need to support their unique business requirements. With the release of the BIG-IP LTM VE, as well as the 8950 and the 11050 appliances, F5 offers even more options to help customers achieve a dynamic infrastructure without compromising reliability, scalability, and performance.”

Availability

The BIG-IP 8950 and 11050 hardware platforms will be available in April. Production and Lab versions of the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Virtual Edition will also be available in April.

Supporting Resources

• ADC slideshare presentation
• BIG-IP LTM VE Product Overview
• BIG-IP Hardware Overview – Datasheet
• Creating a Hybrid ADN Architecture with both Virtual and Physical ADCs – White Paper | Audio Version
• BIG-IP LTM Virtual Edition Content on F5’s DevCentral

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on ensuring the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5’s flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5’s vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organizations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

F5, BIG-IP, Local Traffic Manager, LTM, iRules, iControl, 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.