PRESS CONTACTS
Nathan Misner
Sr. Director of Global Communications
F5 Networks
(206) 272-7494
n.misner@F5.com
Holly Lancaster
WE Communications
(415) 547-7054
hluka@waggeneredstrom.com
New BIG-IP® application delivery solutions, BIG-IQ™ management offerings, and flexible pricing options promote efficient scaling and services orchestration for all IT environments
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
SEATTLE – 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:
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:
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:
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:
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 Möntmann, 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
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) 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 is a trademark or service mark 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.
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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.