F5 Boasts Industry's First On-Demand Application Delivery Controller, Redefining Performance and Scalability with the Introduction of VIPRION

Business Wire, Jan 23, 2008

New F5 bladed chassis enables large enterprises and service providers to easily manage a complete application-fluent infrastructure; VIPRION gives customers control over management, power, space, and operating expenses

SEATTLE -- F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced a new modular, bladed chassis hardware system, VIPRION[TM]. It is the industry's first Application Delivery Controller (ADC) that scales seamlessly with an organization's business -- without sacrificing manageability or simplicity. VIPRION enables organizations to deploy a flexible Application Delivery Network (ADN) right out of the box. Deploy the solution with one or two blades today, and as the infrastructure grows, VIPRION will grow with it. One blade or four, VIPRION looks like one device to users, applications, and administrators, which allows organizations to scale their infrastructure while keeping management costs fixed.

With VIPRION, F5 is expanding its high-end ADC platform offerings to complement the award-winning BIG-IP[R] product family. No other ADC solution on the market can match VIPRION's on-demand scalability and performance. With 36G of L7 throughput and 200,000 SSL transactions per second, VIPRION has a top-end performance 4 times greater than that of any competitive product on the market.

"When it comes to scaling and securing application delivery infrastructure, there can be too many moving parts to perform critical tasks efficiently and effectively," said Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "As a result of this situation, many organizations have no choice but to keep chipping in new technology and human resources on a piecemeal basis, but this strategy is expensive and results in diminishing returns over time. With VIPRION, F5 is addressing these limitations by consolidating security and networking functionality, processing power, load balancing, and application delivery service virtualization into a shared, highly scalable chassis. VIPRION delivers a significant advancement, creating a new 'supercomputer' ADC category that few other vendors will be able to match."

With VIPRION, enterprise customers and service providers can roll out a complete application-fluent infrastructure that is simpler to deploy and manage. Extra performance and processing power can be added at any time without disruption, providing the scalability to allow an organization to develop a sustainable growth strategy for their ADN.

The new VIPRION system enables customers to:

Increase capacity without disruption. Unlike other vendors' blade and chassis components, VIPRION remains an integrated network device regardless of additional blades. This integration and device flexibility produces unparalleled manageability, as infrastructure simplification provides organizations with greater network reliability and control over operational costs. As enterprises require more processing power, whether for L7 processing, SSL, compression, etc., they can simply add another blade to an existing unit rather than deploy a separate device.

Achieve ultimate reliability. VIPRION offers two tiered availability -- at the blade level and chassis level. Because of VIPRION's unique architecture, neither upgrades to capacity nor individual hardware component failures affect the delivery of applications. In a VIPRION system with multiple blades, if a blade fails, the others in the chassis can take over processing traffic with no disruption. Similarly, a single blade can be manually taken offline and removed without disruption.

Leverage the intelligence of TMOS. TMOS(TM), F5's full proxy, pluggable architecture, enables VIPRION to comprehensively manage application traffic on the wire. The iRules(TM) scripting language and iControl([R])API -- built into TMOS -- provide the ultimate flexibility for application fluency and management. VIPRION's processing power and integration capabilities will allow it to fully leverage all of the features and benefits of TMOS, including the addition of modules to provide security, access control, acceleration, WAN optimization, etc.

Access power on-demand. VIPRION uses F5's Clustered Multiprocessing (CMP) technology across its blades to form a virtual processing fabric utilizing all the available CPUs in the system. VIPRION is able to apply more processing power as CPUs are added with no configuration changes required.

"It's an exciting time for application architects with many development teams working on exposing services in SOA architectures or integration projects with SOA-enabled applications like Office 2007," said Karl Triebes, CTO and SVP of Product Development at F5. "The onset of these composite applications and Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX, however, has far-reaching consequences in terms of application performance and security. VIPRION gives organizations the ability to react quickly to changing application needs and transparently scale their network to support these applications, without the associated hefty operational expenses."