F5’s New Hardware Platform Helps Customers Consolidate Dynamic Application Services

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced the BIG-IP ^® 4200v hardware platform. This new appliance offers leading performance to support the consolidation of IT services for mid-sized enterprises facing high traffic volumes, as well as cloud organizations and service providers. In addition, the platform provides enhanced SSL processing capabilities, helping customers improve security while increasing server capacity and reducing overall systems costs.

“With F5’s versatile Application Delivery Controllers, customers can perform a growing number of valuable IT functions in the network,” said Jason Needham, VP of Core Traffic Management and Cloud Solutions at F5. “The 4200v is a purpose-built hardware device with the processing power to support multiple application delivery services, offload SSL processing, and efficiently scale on a unified solution platform. With competitors, organizations would need to deploy multiple point products to add ADN services, further increasing infrastructure complexity and costs.”

According to Gartner Executive Programs’ Amplifying the Enterprise: The 2012 CIO Agenda ¹, two of the top CIO strategies for this year include: “Developing or managing a flexible infrastructure” (#3) and “Reducing the cost of IT” (#2). With F5’s new hardware offering, organizations can seamlessly combine multiple services—such as traffic management, high availability, SSL offloading, security, access control, and acceleration—on a single device. This comprehensive approach helps customers scale systems to meet their needs while minimizing costs and management concerns.

Details

F5’s intelligent and adaptive ADN platforms support all types of IT environments—including traditional data centers, cloud resources, and virtualization solutions. Highlights and performance metrics of the new BIG-IP 4200v hardware platform include:

• Leading Application Layer Performance in Class – The 4200v delivers 850,000 layer 7 requests per second, offering industry-leading performance among mid-range Application Delivery Controller platforms. By providing a high-performance appliance in this range, F5 offers a comprehensive ADN solution that meets the demanding traffic management, security, and optimization needs of mid-sized enterprises and other organizations supporting multiple applications and services. The ability to process more requests per second at the application layer enables the 4200v to make intelligent decisions based on business policies, such as inspecting application payloads and removing confidential information.
• Enhanced SSL Performance for Added Security – The 4200v provides 9,000 SSL TPS for 2K Keys and 8 Gbps of bulk SSL throughput performance, up to 4x what competitors can offer. With these SSL processing levels, organizations can easily encrypt all types of data transfers—not just login and financial transactions—without sacrificing overall performance. The hardware platform’s SSL processing capabilities can also offload CPU-intensive tasks from application servers, freeing up additional capacity and reducing the cost of managing SSL certificates.
• Hardware Compression for Optimized Operations – Reducing the amount of data through compression technologies helps optimize applications, especially over limited-bandwidth networks. By offloading compression from application servers with dedicated hardware, the 4200v reduces server load and mitigates the need to add more servers to scale IT services. The 4200v also boasts the highest compression throughput of any Application Delivery Controller in its class—2x that of the nearest competitor—through its use of hardware compression.
• Leading Performance per Watt for Reduced Energy Costs – With its 80 PLUS Gold Certified high efficiency power supplies—a first in its class—the 4200v delivers leading performance per watt, at 3x that of the nearest competitor. This means less power use, lower cooling requirements, and reduced data center costs.

Supporting Quotes

“Many organizations deploy multiple solutions to manage, optimize, and secure their growing mix of web applications,” said Bruce Hampton, Chief Technical Architect at Milestone Systems. “The BIG-IP 4200v provides a new way for us to help our customers combine availability, traffic management, security, optimization, and other application services while keeping complexity and costs down. Within F5’s breadth of offerings, we’re excited to add this new carrier-grade hardware solution for enterprises and service providers.”

“IT teams are continuously seeking new ways to cut costs and simplify operations,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “For many organizations, this means moving from traditional data centers to a more dynamic approach that takes advantage of virtualization and cloud resources. With F5’s solution portfolio, customers can look at hardware solutions for maximum performance and reliability, as well as virtualized or hybrid deployments for added cost savings and resource efficiency.”

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