F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced enhanced software and hardware offerings across its product portfolio to extend its dominant lead in the market. F5 delivers unprecedented performance and flexibility for today’s most complex and demanding infrastructures, including cloud environments.

F5’s physical and virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) offerings help organizations easily orchestrate, accelerate, and secure the delivery of business-critical applications and network services while driving down costs, as required by today’s agile, adaptive cloud networks. F5’s new platform-based systems are designed around the company’s unique, field-proven intelligent services framework, which gives customers a set of programmable, extensible services for on-demand scalability.

F5 extends its technology leadership with:

• Unrivaled ADC Processing Power for Enterprises and Service Providers

The new VIPRION^® 4800 chassis is built to handle performance levels previously unseen in the industry, applying intelligent services at rates exceeding 20 million layer 7 requests per second and 160 Gbps of SSL bulk throughput (over 4x the nearest competitive offering). With these levels of performance, organizations can effortlessly scale application delivery services within the most demanding clouds and data centers.

• Enhanced BIG-IP^® Virtual Editions with Broad Hypervisor Support

F5’s virtual ADCs now provide up to 3 Gbps of throughput and support a full range of hypervisors and virtualized environments, including Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud Suite, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and KVM/Linux. This gives customers limitless flexibility in leveraging cloud and virtualization technologies to efficiently support their business.

• Leading ADC Performance at the Entry Level and Above

F5 provides the highest performing entry-level appliances to enable customers to “start light and grow right” with the best price/performance value available for ADCs today. F5 is adding the following products to its BIG-IP hardware lineup:

• BIG-IP 2000 series, offering advanced functionality and setting the standard as the first entry-level ADC with 10 GbE interfaces
• BIG-IP 4000s platform, with the 4000 series handling up to 850,000 L7 requests per second for best-in-class performance
• BIG-IP 10200v platform, with vCMP^® capabilities, 40 GbE interfaces, and leading high-end performance

Details

Although point products may solve specific network requirements today, a piecemeal approach to networking increases overall costs, introduces complexity, and imposes unnecessary limitations on scale and capacity. In recent years, the widespread adoption of F5’s ADCs has been driven by the company’s ability to address customers’ current demands and future business needs in parallel.

Designed to provide an intelligent services framework, VIPRION and BIG-IP products enable organizations to efficiently consolidate multiple core network and security functions such as application acceleration, global load balancing, web application firewall, application delivery firewall, and other advanced capabilities. Additionally, F5 technologies like iRules^® and iApps^® enable teams to fine-tune and auto-instantiate custom layer 4–7 services.

F5’s new ADC offerings provide:

• Dynamic Use of IT Resources with F5’s Innovative ScaleN Technology

F5’s ScaleN^™ serves as an important element of the company’s unified platform approach. ScaleN is the industry’s only technology that allows an ADC system to scale dramatically, even with core acceleration and security functionality enabled. All other competing products suffer incremental processing penalties when supporting additional features or running multiple services at once.

ScaleN intelligently allocates resources through multi-tenant virtualization and the ability to scale systems up, down, in, and out with complete device flexibility and resilience. This enables organizations to simplify their IT infrastructures, make existing technology investments more efficient, and better support dynamic resource models and cloud initiatives—all while delivering maximum availability and uptime for crucial applications. The F5 ADC products introduced today are all ScaleN-enabled.

• Deployment Options to Support Physical, Virtual, and Cloud Environments

Traditional practices have called for organizations to build physical data centers using a collection of hardware devices. However, today’s customers are choosing to deploy physical and virtual solutions alongside public and private clouds to dynamically support fluctuating resource needs, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. F5’s offerings enable organizations to select solutions that fit their business priorities and technology requirements, without sacrificing the performance and control that can be essential to their operations. F5’s new products push the boundaries of what the industry can expect from an ADC, raising the standard for other vendors. In addition, F5 has also increased the capabilities of its virtual ADCs, making it easier for customers to combine F5’s application delivery technologies with leading cloud providers like Amazon Web Services.

Supporting Quotes

“We remain focused on offering the most capable physical and virtual ADCs to meet the growing needs of organizations, regardless of which IT and data center architectures they choose to pursue,” said Karl Triebes, EVP of Product Development and CTO at F5. “With our broad portfolio of solutions, we offer efficient ways for customers to consolidate IT services in-house, as well as high-performance platforms that cloud providers can use to support their clients’ most demanding resource needs. Either way, organizations using F5 will have fewer devices to manage, and at a much lower cost than competitors charge for similar capabilities.”

“Given the recent Cisco news, we were looking to replace our ACE deployment with a solution that would easily scale to keep up with the growth of our business,” said Brantley Peers, Sr. Network Engineer at Arise Virtual Solutions, a leading provider of virtual business process outsourcing and contact center services that has seen its business grow significantly over the past year. “With F5’s advanced ADCs, we can support an increasing volume of web traffic and ensure the application availability our clients require. Looking forward, F5 also gives us a platform to expand availability, access, and security capabilities as needed.”

“In a competitive industry, you need to be able to rapidly scale web services to keep up with demand and consumer preferences,” said Lineu Cabral, IT Infrastructure Manager at ViajaNet, one of the largest online ticketing agencies in Brazil and provider of travel services. “F5’s ADCs provide us with enhanced performance, scalability, and security, including SSL encryption for all online transactions. Since deploying the BIG-IP platform, we’ve been able to forego purchasing additional equipment and reduce the number of servers required to support our business by a third.”

“Recent market events have put an increasing spotlight on the role of the ADC and represent an ideal time for enterprises to rethink their requirements for this portion of the data center,” wrote Mark Fabbi, VP at Gartner, Inc., in a recent report. “The features of advanced ADCs are compelling for those that make an effort to shift their thinking and organizational boundaries. In nearly all cases, the small incremental investment in advanced ADC platforms is easily compensated by reduced requirements for servers and bandwidth, and by the clear improvements in end-user experience and productivity.”¹

“With F5’s new 2000 series, we can offer a full-featured ADC to our clients at an entry-level price point, with a scalable platform to support growth,” said Jim Quarantillo, Principal/Owner at GuidePoint Security. “We anticipate significant interest from customers looking for leading availability and traffic management, as well as those planning to add advanced functionality down the road on F5’s unified platform.”

Availability

All F5 solutions mentioned in this announcement will be orderable in February 2013. Each of the platforms introduced today supports F5’s ScaleN technology. Please contact a local F5 sales office for availability in specific countries.

Additional Resources

• VIPRION Hardware – Overview
• BIG-IP Hardware – Overview
• BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager^™ Virtual Edition – Overview
• ScaleN Blog Series on DevCentral
• BIG-IP ADCs and ADF – SlideShare Presentation
• BIG-IP Virtual Edition Trial Page
• Top Considerations When Choosing an ADC – White Paper

¹Gartner, “Load Balancers Are Officially Dead; Refocus on Application Delivery,” Mark Fabbi, November 14, 2012

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) makes the connected world run better. F5 helps organizations meet the demands and embrace the opportunities that come with the relentless growth of voice, data, and video traffic, mobile workers, and applications—in the data center, the network, and the cloud. The world’s largest businesses, service providers, government entities, and consumer brands rely on F5’s intelligent services framework to deliver and protect their applications and services while ensuring people stay connected. Learn more at www.f5.com.

You can also follow @f5networks on Twitter or visit us on Facebook for more information about F5, its partners, and technology. For a complete listing of F5 community sites, please visit www.f5.com/news-press-events/web-media/community.html.

F5, VIPRION, BIG-IP, iApps, iRules, Local Traffic Manager, ScaleN, vCMP, 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.