SCIENCE

F5 Networks announced new BIG-IP platform offerings. Adding to F5's broad range of Application Delivery Controller (ADC) solutions, the BIG-IP 11000 platform is specifically designed for high levels of throughput, making it an ideal solution to support application acceleration to improve user experience, and data center-to-data center replication to enhance disaster recovery efforts and overall business continuity.

With today's announcement, F5 is also introducing Federal Information Processing Standard-compliant Hardware Security Module editions of the BIG-IP 11000 and 11050 platforms to help government, healthcare, and financial services organizations meet demanding security requirements, including SSL encryption mandates. By enabling customers to manage FIPS security through the BIG-IP system instead of on individual servers, organizations are able to save up to 25 percent on compliance costs alone. In addition to the new 11000 series releases, F5 is expanding its 6900 series to include the BIG-IP 6900S hardware platform to support applications that require high levels of SSL processing.

"F5 provides a broad portfolio of hardware and virtual ADC platforms to help organizations seamlessly and efficiently integrate application services within a scalable, dynamic data center framework," said Karl Triebes, SVP of Product Development and CTO at F5. "The 11000 platform is particularly well suited to help organizations combine acceleration and optimization services with other application delivery functions, resulting in superior user experience, significant cost reductions, and streamlined management operations. By providing flexible deployment options for customers, organizations can grow their infrastructures on demand to take advantage of resource-based computing models, including cloud environments."

Details

F5 provides purpose-built hardware for the BIG-IP product family to help organizations address their most significant application delivery challenges. Along with the recent introduction of F5's BIG-IP version 11, F5's extensible hardware and software solutions integrate application delivery, security, acceleration, and optimization services to meet customers' evolving needs. With the introduction of the BIG-IP 11000, 11000/11050 FIPS, and 6900S platforms, F5 is enhancing its flexible deployment options to help organizations implement dynamic data centers with hardware-based or hybrid application delivery architectures.

Combined with BIG-IP version 11, the new hardware platforms help customers:

-- Integrate Application Delivery Services for Streamlined Operations

With the BIG-IP system's TMOS architecture, only F5 can provide truly integrated application delivery services, enabling organizations to accelerate applications, scale deployments, and consolidate infrastructures. Because of this unified approach, F5's ADC platforms are uniquely positioned to help organizations deploy applications faster in traditional, virtual, or cloud environments to better serve globally dispersed users and devices. With the 11000 platform in particular, customers have a high-performance solution designed to support BIG-IP WAN Optimization Manager and BIG-IP WebAccelerator deployments, as well as other F5 product module offerings.

-- Ensure Optimized Performance, High Availability, and Reduced Operations Costs

The 11000 platform enables enterprises to cost-effectively combine traditional ADC functionality with web acceleration and data replication capabilities, helping organizations optimize user experience and meet service level agreements related to business continuity. Boasting up to 20 Gbps of LAN-side throughput, 16 Gbps of hardware compression, and optional solid-state drives, the 11000 provides unmatched performance and reliability in its class. With optimized data center-to-data center replication, users enjoy high availability of applications and administrators benefit from shortened backup windows, improving business continuity overall. Moreover, deploying the 11000 with F5's WAN optimization and web acceleration solutions can further reduce data center costs by offloading SSL, compression, and caching functions from application servers.

-- Uphold Compliance and Security Standards to Protect Organizations

With today's announcement, F5's 11000 and 11050 ADC platforms are also being offered in FIPS-compliant Hardware Security Module editions to help customers meet the stringent security and compliance mandates their industries require. In particular, U.S. government agencies are required to use FIPS-compliant products to protect sensitive data. In combining FIPS capabilities with application delivery services on a single device, the BIG-IP 11000 series provides compelling price/performance advantages and protection for SSL-encrypted application traffic while simplifying compliance management. Capable of processing 50K SSL transactions per second, the 11000 and 11050 platforms offer the highest level of FIPS 140-2 Level 2 performance in the industry. Additionally, the new BIG-IP 6900S platform provides significantly enhanced SSL performance and encryption to help keep enterprise customers' data secure as they transition to 2048-bit SSL certificates in line with the National Institute of Standards and Technology's recommendations.