BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager

Get the most out of multiple data centers

Disaster recovery

When users, whether from IPv4 or IPv6 clients, try to access a data center that is overloaded or unreachable, BIG-IP GTM automatically and seamlessly directs them to a secondary data center. Users aren’t even aware of the switch. They could be accessing a data center at corporate headquarters, in another city, or on another continent. This capability makes BIG-IP GTM especially important for enterprises that need to maintain operations in the event of a natural disaster, power failure, DNS DDoS attack, or any other large-scale service disruption.

Application management

Distributed applications may rely on several web servers, application servers, and databases that work in tandem. BIG-IP GTM automates the process of tracking and managing interdependencies among individual application services, helping you achieve high availability, persistence, and maintenance for these applications. It eliminates the guesswork, errors, and inefficiencies related to manual management, so you have a holistic framework to manage all application services across multiple sites.

DNS security and performance

With a rapid increase in DNS queries, BIG-IP GTM scales dramatically up to 10x by using DNS Express to manage and absorb millions of legitimate and attack queries, easily delivering high-speed DNS query responses and enabling DNS DDoS attack absorbtion and protection. Adminstrators configure BIG-IP GTM to inspect and manipulate DNS requests and reponses using DNS iRules for a fast, customized DNS infrastructure. An IP Anycast integration with BIG-IP GTM redistributes requests to one IP address among all devices based on geolocation, easily managing all DNS query requests.

In the event of cache poisoning of LDNS servers or man-in-the-middle attacks, BIG-IP GTM DNSSEC protection delivers a dynamically signed query response, ensuring secure information is received and helping you achieve DNSSEC compliance. The BIG-IP system is now certified by ICSA as a network firewall, and BIG-IP GTM with DNS Services protects your DNS infrastructure from attacks with DNS firewall capabilities. For administrators needing DNS Services added to their network topology without global traffic management, a DNS Services add-on for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager delivers fast DNS customization and management.

Global business criteria management

Global enterprises often have data centers spread throughout the world. So why send a user in Hong Kong to the Dallas data center when there's one in Singapore? BIG-IP GTM uses geolocation-based load balancing to inspect a user's IP address and determine the most efficient data center. The topology could be based on continent, country, ISP, or custom IP subnet level.

BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager is available as a standalone physical edition, a virtual edition, and a product module for BIG-IP LTM.

BIG-IP Product Modules:

• Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
• Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition (LTM VE)
• Global Traffic Manager (GTM)
• Link Controller 
• Application Security Manager (ASM)
• WebAccelerator 
• Edge Gateway
• WAN Optimization Manager (WOM)
• Access Policy Manager (APM)