[April 03, 2012]

F5's VIPRION Solutions Help Service Providers and Enterprises Optimize Infrastructures and Reduce Costs

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced new VIPRION^® solutions, including the 4480 chassis and 4300 performance blade. Extending F5's portfolio of physical and virtual solutions, these new hardware offerings are specifically designed to help service providers and enterprises address rapidly increasing traffic levels and the growing demand for enhanced services. In addition, F5's industry leading processing capabilities help organizations efficiently scale their infrastructures and seamlessly integrate security-including data center firewall and access solutions-without sacrificing performance or ease of management.

"To meet the evolving needs of our customers and the market at large, F5 is committed to offering a breadth of deployment options that help organizations efficiently scale their infrastructures," said Karl Triebes, EVP of Product Development and CTO at F5. "By leveraging F5^® hardware and virtual platforms with the company's powerful clustered multiprocessing technologies, organizations remain flexible as they build out dynamic infrastructures-including cloud and virtualization technologies-to support business initiatives and user requirements. Unlike other vendors' products, which can be difficult and costly to upgrade, F5's VIPRION solutions automatically pool resources from separate blades as they're added to help organizations implement a true 'scale on demand' strategy."

F5's VIPRION solutions enable organizations to stay ahead of user and infrastructure demands. The new products deliver a number of performance advantages when compared to other vendors' Application Delivery Controller (ADC (News - Alert)) offerings. Industry-leading metrics and product highlights include:

• The market's first 40 Gbps Ethernet support for an application and services delivery platform
• 80 Gbps of SSL throughput, approximately 6x what other vendors' ADCs provide
• 320 Gbps of L4 throughput, 4x competitors' offerings
• 160 Gbps of L7 throughput, 2x competitors' offerings
• 80 Gbps of hardware compression for application acceleration, 4x competitors' offerings

Details

Enterprises and service providers currently face a number of challenges impacting application and services delivery, as well as user experience: increased bandwidth needs, demand to support rich applications, and ever-present requirements to scale efficiently and reduce operations costs. F5's broad range of ADCs-including NEBS compliant solutions-provide a scalable platform that can easily combine optimization, traffic management, and security services as organizations grow and IT initiatives take shape. With F5's new VIPRION products, customers can increase processing power by simply adding another performance blade, ensuring that additional capabilities can be supported without disrupting existing services.

F5's new VIPRION hardware solutions help customers:

• Consolidate Application and Service Delivery Capabilities to Streamline Operations

Unlike other vendors' technologies, F5's unique TMOS^® architecture enables organizations to deploy application solutions on a flexible, integrated platform. This unified approach simplifies management for IT teams, removing the burden of maintaining multiple point products across the application delivery infrastructure or constantly reconfiguring the network. With F5's new solutions, customers can optimize applications and consolidate infrastructures to better meet the needs of their users while staying within their budgets. Similarly, many service providers continue to deploy multiple point solutions to support NAT, IPv6, DNS, AAA, optimization, traffic steering, and load balancing capabilities. With F5, service provider customers realize cost savings by consolidating core IP infrastructure services to simplify operations.

• Elegantly Scale Services, Performance, and Connectivity to Support Growth

In pursuing a dynamic data center model, organizations can harness the context-aware intelligence of F5 solutions to monitor, manage, and modify services based on network and user conditions. Additionally, F5's unique Scale^N(TM) architecture enables service providers to deploy a converged services framework that can consolidate and optimize the delivery of voice, data, and video traffic to uphold service level agreements and other subscriber access requirements. These capabilities are of particular interest to service providers, especially as billing and usage models evolve to reflect today's network demands and users' consumption patterns-and further, because quicker deployment of new services can help generate higher average revenue per user (ARPU).

• Provide Added Security with Enhanced Firewall Capabilities

In recent months, massive cyber attacks-such as DDoS-have impacted some of the world's best-known organizations, damaging the companies' finances and industry reputations due to downtime, lost revenue, and confidentiality breaches. As a result, security administrators are turning to enhanced data center firewall solutions to further guard their infrastructures from sophisticated attacks. Many vendors offer separate products throughout the infrastructure, but this segmented approach provides limited protection and can be difficult to scale. By contrast, F5 offers an ICSA-certified firewall that integrates L3-L7 security services to protect against massive, multilayered, and blended attacks. From a capacity standpoint, F5's carrier-grade hardware delivers 144 million concurrent connections (3x the closest competitor) and 5.6 million L4 connections per second (nearly 12x the competition) at a similar price point to other vendors' offerings. In addition, F5's Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions lead the industry in performance.

Supporting Quotes

"Among other factors, the rapid proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other web-enabled devices continues to add strain to networks, as well as the IT teams charged to support them," said Cindy Borovick, Program Vice President, Enterprise and Datacenter Networks at IDC (News - Alert). "In aiming to provide a superior user experience for end customers, service providers and enterprises must be able to nimbly scale their infrastructures, including cloud and other 'as-a-service' offerings. Accordingly, organizations should take a dynamic approach-one that incorporates both hardware performance and software flexibility-to managing a growing portfolio of services while simultaneously taking advantage of vendor solutions that can simplify operations, reduce costs, and provide enhanced security capabilities."

"We work closely with organizations to tailor solutions that address their IT challenges," said Roger Niles, Director of National Programs at Clearshark. "F5's new VIPRION solutions are a good fit for enterprises and service providers pursuing hardware-based or hybrid application delivery architectures."

Availability

The VIPRION 4480 chassis and 4300 performance blade will be available later this month. For more information about F5's VIPRION solutions, please visit www.f5.com/products/hardware/viprion.html.

Additional Resources

• New VIPRION Solutions - SlideShare Presentation
• VIPRION Overview - Datasheet
• Supersizing the Data Center: Big Data and Jumbo Frames - DevCentral Blog Post
• Moore's (Traffic) Law - DevCentral Blog Post
• The Conflation of Pay-as-you-Grow Hardware with On-Demand - DevCentral Blog Post

About F5 Networks (News - Alert)

F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), helps the world's largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. F5^® solutions help integrate disparate technologies to provide greater control of the infrastructure, improve application delivery and data management, and give users seamless, secure, and accelerated access to applications from their corporate desktops and smart devices. An open architectural framework enables F5 customers to apply business policies at "strategic points of control" across the IT infrastructure and into the public cloud. F5 products give customers the agility they need to align IT with changing business conditions, deploy scalable solutions on demand, and manage mobile access to data and services. Enterprises, service and cloud providers, and leading online companies worldwide rely on F5 to optimize their IT investments and drive business forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

You can also follow @f5networks on Twitter (News - Alert) 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, TMOS, Scale^N, 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 (News - Alert).

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