F5'S next gen product injects intelligence into the network.

F5 Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq:FFIV), a provider of Application Traffic Management products, has announced the release of its next generation BIG-IP product with F5's revolutionary Traffic Management Operating System (TM/OS). The new release of BIG-IP, with its TM/OS architecture, injects unsurpassed levels of intelligence into the network. It is the industry's first solution that enables the network to provide 'Application Infrastructure Services' that can be leveraged by any application. In addition, F5 is announcing a new series of performance-leading hardware platforms. This announcement benefits any organization that cannot afford to be handcuffed by restrictive networks that cannot support today's or tomorrow's complex applications. F5's BIG-IP solution provides organizations with a more intelligent and adaptable way to secure, optimize and deliver applications, enabling organizations to efficiently and competitively run their business.

F5's BIG-IP product presents a superior alternative for organizations because it unifies traffic management and application optimization tasks within a single framework to ensure that all applications are delivered much more rapidly, reliably and securely. It enables the network to be adaptable to support emerging applications, giving customers a solution that will satisfy changing business requirements without the need for application rewrites, costly hardware additions or replacement.

"Enterprise organizations are recognizing that successful application delivery is dependent upon a coordinated effort between the network and application teams," said Mark Fabbi, Research Vice-President at Gartner, Inc. "A unified application delivery approach is the key to the solution. It affords enterprises an adaptive infrastructure that can accommodate business applications, which continually grow in size and complexity. By unifying traffic management functions, organizations will have the agility to adapt to changing network and business requirements."

At the heart of the next-generation BIGIP product is F5's ground-breaking Traffic Management/Operating System (TM/OS)--a unified, fast application proxy architecture that gives organizations complete flexibility and control over legacy and next generation applications. With the BIG-IP product, customers have an integrated solution for all IP applications offering centralized and unified application infrastructure services like rate shaping, intelligent compression, TCP optimization, IPv6 gateway, load balancing, application security, high performance SSL, and total control of the entire application flow--without compromising performance or introducing latency. Highlights include:

Unified Application Infrastructure Services. The BIG-IP solution's pluggable architecture incorporates a revolutionary design for inspecting, controlling, transforming, programming and scaling the various services needed to successfully deliver applications. BIG-IP's Unified Application Infrastructure Services represent the most cohesive set of functionality, allowing organizations to more efficiently combine, target and extend the services required to improve the efficiency of each application deployment.

TM/OS fast application proxy. With its full proxy design, BIG-IP can efficiently isolate clients from the server-side flows and independently maintain optimal performance for each connecting device, translating communications between systems for improved application performance and security. Any system or IP application connected to BIG-IP will now work more efficiently.

Enhanced iRules and Universal Inspection Engine (UIE). BIG-IP comes with new versions of F5's customizable iRules and Universal Inspection Engine (UIE) to provide unprecedented control over how to handle application traffic at any moment within the application transaction or flow. With complete payload inspection and transformation capabilities, scalable event-driven iRules, and session-aware switching, BIG-IP provides the most intelligent control point to address diverse application delivery issues at network speeds.

WAN optimization and application acceleration. BIG-IP provides a highly targeted, centralized and efficient means for reducing traffic volumes and minimizing the effect of Internet latency and client connection bottlenecks that impact application performance. Through capabilities such as intelligent compression, BIG-IP provides rich support for compressing a variety of file types such as HTTP, XML, Javascript, J2EE applications and many others--accelerating application performance as much as 3 times while reducing bandwidth utilization by up to 80%.

Flexible Layer 7 rate shaping capabilities. Enables organizations to manage bandwidth to ensure that priority applications are delivered without delay. BIG-IP also provides customized control to set application-based bandwidth limits, allowable bandwidth spikes, and can establish queuing relationships between applications.

Comprehensive IPv6 gateway. BIG-IP, through the IPv6 Gateway Module, provides complete IP transformation and load balancing capabilities between v4 and v6 networks. This makes user migration and the pooling of mixed IPv4 and IPv6 host resources manageable, cost-effective and possible.

Dramatic improvement in SSL acceleration performance. Customers can realize significant SSL performance increases; up to 15,000 SSL TPS (Transactions Per Second) available on the BIG-IP 6400. SSL acceleration significantly helps improve the performance of servers while providing security, speed and traffic management during business-critical online transactions. All BIG-IP systems include a 100 TPS license.

"Siebel Systems is committed to ensuring successful customer deployments and outcomes, which includes maximizing the availability, quality and performance of Siebel applications," said Francisco Casas, Server Technologies Group Manager at Siebel Systems. "F5's new TMOS architecture and BIG-IP features provide a compelling set of capabilities and advantages that will further enhance our customers' experience when deploying Siebel business applications."

F5's new series of performance-leading hardware platforms give BIG-IP next-generation application switch products an enormous boost in power, while offering unmatched management, usability and scalability. F5's IP Application Switches feature extreme capacity for handling the heaviest traffic loads at both Layer 4 and Layer 7. All platforms include multi-boot support, warm upgrades, lights-out management/remote boot, and superior system instrumentation. New platform models include the 1500, 3400, and 6400 Application Switches.

With the next generation of BIG-IP, iControl has been dramatically expanded and optimized to provide superior performance and unparalleled integration capabilities. iControl now provides a full event based API, providing a publish / subscribe model that enables BIG-IP to push BIG-IP event information to any device or application. To help customers embrace v9 iControl for new applications and rapidly migrate existing applications, F5 is offering a variety of tools including a code analyzer utility for migration, extensive documentation, and samples that will make adoption of iControl quick and easy for network professionals and application developers.

"With this next generation of BIG-IP, we took no shortcuts to deliver this product, which incorporates over two years of R&D and detailed input from hundreds of enterprises," said Dan Matte, Senior Vice-President of Marketing at F5 Networks. "Unlike our competitors, we recognized that feature consolidation alone without the proper architecture will not live up to customers' application delivery and performance requirements. With this product, F5 is reinforcing its position as the leading innovator; delivering the only solution for complete application fluency, control and flexibility to help IT staff adapt to diverse and evolving application requirements."

The BIG-IP software and hardware will be available September 7. Pricing starts at US$16,995 (list). Existing F5 customers with current maintenance agreements and hardware platforms can take advantage of all the capabilities in BIG-IP version 9. Your F5 salesperson or reseller can provide you with detailed configuration, upgrade and pricing information. Standard reseller discounts apply.