F5’s Partner Ecosystem Supports New Synthesis Architectural Vision

F5 aligns with technology and industry leaders in enabling customers to simplify the deployment of flexible, cost-effective software defined application services

SEATTLE—F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV) announced today partner support for its new Synthesis architectural vision. Additional details around F5 Synthesis™ are found in a separate press release. F5 maintains a thriving community of sales and technology partners, and Synthesis promotes new integration points for companies to collaborate with F5, with the result being more flexible, unified solutions comprising many vendors’ offerings. F5’s open architecture gives partners a strong foundation to deliver value-added IT services and better meet the evolving needs of enterprise and service provider organizations.

F5 Synthesis features elements that have been specifically designed to resonate within F5’s partner ecosystem and help customers take advantage of:

• High-Performance Fabric to Support IT Services – F5’s physical and virtual products form an elastic, multi-tenant fabric to deliver software defined application services™(SDAS™). This extensible approach enables organizations to combine solutions from F5, its technology partners, and other third-party vendors to support evolving business needs. The F5 Synthesis fabric can support up to 1.28 million instances in a combination of administrative domains and virtual instances by clustering up to 32 unique F5 platforms deployed across any combination of hardware, software, or cloud resources, resulting in a combined throughput of 20.5 TB and connection capacity of 9.2 billion. Unified management enables the automated discovery, topology, and provisioning of the services fabric, reducing the operational overhead associated with manual processes.
   
• Intelligent Services Orchestration – Beyond just combining disparate technologies, F5’s architectural vision enables enterprises and service providers to seamlessly manage, scale, and automate the richest set of application services spanning device, network, and application requirements for reliability, security, and performance. This helps customers configure infrastructures for cost savings, while maintaining the ability to further programmatically extend and adapt systems, and rapidly deploy new services as needed.
   
• Simplified Business Models – To better support customers’ ability to deploy flexible services with cloud, hybrid, and usage-based IT models, F5 is optimizing its licensing practices. Looking forward, F5 will examine additional opportunities to address customers’ changing preferences around how data center environments—including software defined data centers—are maintained.

The Synthesis framework for SDAS provides an open architecture based on standard APIs that allows partners to leverage a high-performance fabric to deliver a rich set of application services that complement their go-to-market solutions. This approach enhances partners’ ability to collaborate with F5 around specific industry focus areas and technologies, including:

• Cloud – Cloud providers are enabled with the richest set of application services available to differentiate their offerings from competitors. Taking advantage of F5 Synthesis’ programmability enables providers to easily incorporate advanced delivery services into their own service catalogs. Customers benefit from the ability to consistently apply the same policies and services to applications deployed in both their own data center and the provider’s cloud environment.
   
• Software Defined Networks – SDN technology partners gain the ability to collaboratively inject the essential layer 4-7 services needed to accomplish automated provisioning and orchestration of the network service stack. The result for customers is a comprehensive, software defined approach to delivering network and application services across data center and cloud environments.
   
• Security – SDAS include a wide variety of security services, from authentication to identity and access control to DDoS mitigation and web application security. The availability of these services enhances partners’ capabilities to provide protection against an increasing volume of attacks aimed at applications, the network, and end-user devices.

SUPPORTING QUOTES

“Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is about velocity and speed of application deployment in the data center through the network that works as an adaptive system for real-time application delivery through an innovative policy-driven architecture that automates and unifies: physical and virtual networks, security, and real-time visibility and troubleshooting, with unprecedented performance and scale. Cisco and F5 look forward to working to integrate our platforms and deliver simple, secure, scalable, and agile infrastructure that responds to the dynamic needs of the business.”
Soni Jiandani, SVP, Marketing, Cisco

“Leading companies today are virtualizing their networks to increase business velocity. VMware is teaming with leaders such as F5 to support customers’ transition to network virtualization. In making VMware NSX™ an extensible platform that can use next-generation offerings such as F5’s Synthesis, we are empowering customers to speed the rate of innovation through faster network provisioning, flexible workload placement and mobility, and reduced complexity—all enabling better, faster, and more cost-effective IT services. Our partnership with F5 demonstrates our commitment to providing customers with choice and flexibility in the solutions that help them to optimize their virtual networks.”
Chris King, VP, Product Marketing, Networking & Security Business Unit, VMware

“Customers require agile networks and services that deliver speed and effectively support business applications. HP’s software defined network solutions and ecosystem work in concert with the F5 Synthesis architecture to deliver simplified solutions with automated policies and orchestration for the network as well as the services running on top of it.”
Bethany Mayer, SVP and General Manager, Networking, HP

“At Dell, we are looking to extend SDN to higher layers of the stack for customers looking for service flexibility across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. F5’s Synthesis vision is a natural fit for us. We see the programmable aspects of F5 technologies providing compelling advantages for customers looking to program their networks and extend the capabilities of applications and network services.”
Arpit Joshipura, VP, Dell Networking

“Automation, orchestration, and interoperability across network, application, and virtualization elements are critical to high-performance cloud and data center deployments. The combination of Arista data center switches and Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) APIs with the F5 Synthesis model effectively combines our two companies’ technologies and neatly addresses the challenge of increasing network service velocity for layer 4-7 services.”
Anshul Sadana, SVP, Arista Networks

“We enjoy active technology collaboration with F5. NSN’s Technology Vision 2020 shares many of the same goals as Synthesis in supporting intelligent, programmable networks, evolving the industry toward software defined networks. As part of our outside-in innovation approach, we look forward to exploring new avenues of collaboration with F5 in this domain to bring additional benefits to our customers.”
Hossein Moiin, EVP, Technology and Innovation and member of the executive board, Nokia Solutions and Networks

“With SDAS and the Synthesis ecosystem, F5 is intelligently combining applications, access, and security to quickly tailor services and bolster defenses. F5’s emphasis on orchestrating security solutions within the IT infrastructure, combined with our leading TRITON® security solutions, will provide proactive defenses against advanced attacks and data theft.”
Russ Dietz, CTO for security company Websense, Inc.

“We see the scope and scale of security vulnerabilities continuing to grow in conjunction with advancements in web services and mobility. F5 technologies provide a valuable platform to more holistically layer defenses and enhance application performance. With strategic positions in data centers and perimeter networks, F5 solutions together with WhiteHat provide leading web application security integration and risk management capabilities.”
Stephanie Fohn, CEO of WhiteHat Security

“Our customers rely on Trace3 to ensure that their data center technologies deliver dependable performance and scalability, without sacrificing one for the other. F5 Synthesis extends the value of our infrastructure solutions by leveraging the rapid deployment and automation of application services within a purpose-built architecture model.”
Josh Berezin, President, Trace3

“Historically, organizations have struggled to efficiently combine hardware, software, and services without opening up new attack vectors. With Synthesis and F5’s fabric-based approach, we’ll have a powerful new toolset to help customers elegantly orchestrate security services, provide enhanced protection from multilayer threats, and capably safeguard applications, users, and networks.”
Dan Thormodsgaard, VP of Solutions Architecture at FishNet Security

SUPPORTING RESOURCES

F5 executive videos, white papers, datasheets, diagrams, and additional information on Synthesis and specific reference architectures are available through http://synthesis.f5.com/.

Additional commentary on F5’s efforts with Cisco is available in this DevCentral™ blog entry: https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/f5-and-cisco-application-centric-from-top-to-bottom-and-end-to-end

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, F5 Synthesis, software defined application services, SDAS, 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.