F5 Broadens Management Solution Portfolio with New Virtual Appliance

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced F5^® Enterprise Manager^™ Version 2.2, a centralized management solution that enables enterprises, service providers, and cloud providers to effectively monitor and manage multiple F5 BIG-IP^® Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). With this release, the Enterprise Manager solution is also now available as a virtual appliance, giving customers greater flexibility in building hybrid physical-virtual environments to maximize efficiency. The Enterprise Manager Virtual Edition offering represents F5’s commitment to provide customers greater choice and flexibility when deploying both physical and virtual solutions.

Details

Enterprise Manager gives customers a single-pane view of their entire application delivery infrastructure in real time, and provides monitoring and management tools for optimizing performance and scaling the infrastructure to meet business needs. Version 2.2 of Enterprise Manager includes the following enhancements:

• Flexible Deployment Options with the New Virtual Edition – In an effort to scale virtualized infrastructures, limit IT costs, and keep up with rapidly growing demand, many organizations deploy multiple BIG-IP solutions—both physical and virtual—to intelligently optimize applications and network performance. Whether organizations are managing these solutions within the corporate firewall or off premises as part of a managed service or cloud solution, they need a flexible management platform that enables them to manage multiple ADCs. With Enterprise Manager Version 2.2, customers now have the choice of deploying a virtual or physical appliance. The virtual edition can help customers reduce upfront costs, enable faster deployments, save space in data centers, and alleviate the need for hardware certifications for IT personnel.
• Enhanced SSL Management and Reporting – As customers migrate to 2K SSL keys and begin to realize the resulting performance impact on their application servers, they need a way to easily track and evaluate transactions per second information for their ADCs. Enterprise Manager Version 2.2 adds new reporting features to capture current and historical SSL transactions per second data, enabling customers to analyze and compare average and peak usage against maximum thresholds. With this information, customers are better equipped to plan for capacity increases by upgrading SSL licensing or hardware platform capabilities to meet their application needs.
• Auto-Tracking of Service Contract End Dates – Enterprise Manager Version 2.2 automatically tracks service contract end dates, includes them in reports, and can send alerts to administrators prior to service contracts ending. This feature eliminates the need for manual tracking, helping administrators ensure that there is never a lapse in service coverage for critical BIG-IP devices.
• Support for External Databases – Enterprise Manager traditionally stores performance data in an internal MySQL database. Although external databases and reporting services could access the MySQL database, external databases could not store performance data directly. For customers that prefer to store performance monitoring statistics in an external database, Enterprise Manager Version 2.2 now provides that option. This gives customers the ability to configure and dedicate as much storage as they need to collect performance metrics for analysis.

Supporting Quotes

“Many of the world’s largest global organizations rely on F5’s BIG-IP solutions to ensure that their physical and virtual infrastructures can keep pace with rapidly growing application delivery demands,” said Jason Needham, Sr. Director of Product Management at F5. “Enterprise Manager Virtual Edition not only helps customers cut costs while improving their overall IT agility and scalability, it also gives them the flexibility to choose how they want to configure their infrastructures, with whatever mix of physical and virtual devices they’re comfortable with.”

“F5 demonstrates its commitment to customers by enhancing and adapting its solutions to meet changing market demands, while keeping an integrated and repeatable architecture in place for optimal efficiency,” said Zeus Kerravala, SVP of Enterprise Research at Yankee Group. “By providing virtual editions of its BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, Access Policy Manager, ARX, and now Enterprise Manager, F5 is giving customers the flexibility to choose the type of solution that best suits their particular business needs without sacrificing performance, reliability, or scalability.”

“Enterprise Manager provides customers managing multiple F5 ADC devices with critical visibility of all network traffic and device performance in a central location, which significantly reduces complexity and cost,” said Toby Penn, Solutions Director at Accuvant. “Version 2.2’s expanded SSL management and reporting features reinforce that criticality. I believe that companies are really going to like the additional deployment options they get with the new virtual edition. As an F5 partner, we’re looking forward to offering our customers this essential visibility with a virtual solution.”

Availability

Enterprise Manager Version 2.2 and Enterprise Manager Virtual Edition are currently available.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on ensuring the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5’s flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5’s vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organizations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

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F5, Enterprise Manager, BIG-IP, Local Traffic Manager, Access Policy Manager, and ARX 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.