White Papers

To ensure the full potential of your virtual platform solution, you need to make sure your application and storage network is prepared to handle the added stresses of a virtual machine (VM) infrastructure. This White Paper describes how F5 technology enables your network to adapt to virtualization needs, ensure high availability (HA), maximize resources, and improve performance so you can get the most out of your investment.

This paper addresses disaster recovery plans, common barriers to success, and performance gains that can be achieved by combining the F5 WANJet application acceleration solution with CLARiiON MirrorView/A replication solutions from EMC.

Public storage clouds are viewed less than favorably by enterprise organizations even though many of them foresee adopting public storage clouds in the not-too-distant future. Changing that viewpoint requires that service providers bring forward public storage cloud offerings that possess seven key attributes that will sway the opinion of enterprise decision makers and prompt them to adopt public storage clouds sooner rather than later.

Getting your applications to work properly over a Wide Area Network (WAN) is a complex task, and it is not likely to get easier any time soon. This White Paper discusses how an Application Delivery Network can accelerate your applications and help make sure they are secure, fast, and available.

Both asymmetric and symmetric acceleration technologies can deliver great benefit to your users. But how and where do you deploy them? This paper illustrates how a typical company can benefit from asymmetric and symmetric acceleration.

Cloud computing continues to be one of today’s most intriguing IT technologies, yet enterprises are still weighing whether it can help them achieve their business goals. Working together, VMware, F5 Networks, and BlueLock offer integrated solutions that help enterprises develop agility so they can easily and efficiently use cloud resources on demand to meet their changing needs.

In December of 2004, Visa and MasterCard joined forces to simplify compliance for merchants and payment processors with the jointly-developed, 12-point PCI standard. This White Paper discusses how F5 Networks helps with the 6 core areas and 10 of the 12 requirements.

As the impetus to begin a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment has grown in recent years, VDI solutions have begun to proliferate in the market. These solutions range from new features and functionality offered by market leaders to point products from smaller players that cater to enterprises’ VDI needs. A complete VDI solution should deliver a reliable, high-performing desktop user experience while taming complexity and supporting scalability within a secure, stable framework.

One of SOA's primary goals is to align IT with the business. F5's BIG-IP can and does assist in aligning IT with the business by enabling agility, mitigating risk, and encouraging reuse. As part of the IT infrastructure, these devices can improve overall performance, enhance security, and offload tasks from both servers and developers, providing quantifiable benefits over alternative solutions.

Organizations need an end-to-end web application and database security solution to protect data, customers, and their businesses. The integrated solution from F5 and Oracle provides improved protection against SQL injection attacks and correlated reporting for richer contextual information.

Deploying VMware View with Dell servers and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager using the features and best practices described in this paper can help ensure that the virtual desktop infrastructure is secure, scalable, flexible and available.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) come in a variety of hardware and software combinations, but mission-critical application delivery demands mission-critical ADC hardware.

To address the management needs of any environment along with managing each individual component of the ADN holistically, F5 has created four unique solutions to address any management scenario. Although each solution is designed to address a particular need, all of the solutions work together to provide limitless options for managing a full-featured ADN.

There are many unique challenges and pieces to application security that most devices today aren't able to provide. Most enterprises still want to provide application security with just a Web Application Firewall, ignoring the rest of the application security puzzle or leaving those duties to existing security appliances and controls. This White Paper describes application security, and discusses integrated security for any application.

This White Paper provides an overview of F5's Application Security Manager (ASM), an Application Firewall, and how it protects applications from hackers and other malicious attacks, and enforces granular security policies to protect web applications, as well as confidential information from both random and targeted application security attacks.

F5's Application Ready Solution Templates are designed to ensure that the savings realized through consolidation are protected by reducing the time, effort, and application-specific knowledge required of administrators to optimally deploy applications that are secure, fast, and available through the use of BIG-IP devices.

Whether critical applications live in the cloud, in the data center, or in both, organizations need a strategic point of control for application security. F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) provides the security, intelligence, and performance that today’s dynamic infrastructure demands.

After many years of purely negative security provided by anti-virus scanners, IDS/IPS, and antispam engines, it's refreshing to hear that the positive security model - the basis for tried and true security devices like network firewalls and ACLs - is coming back in vogue. This White Paper discusses positive and negative security models and Web Application Firewalls.

Why do attackers target federal systems? They seek intelligence, advantage and political gain. The possibilities are endless: intelligence about an opponent’s military capabilities, movement of high-value individuals or national economic strategies; advantage by disabling or crippling sensors and systems or prelaunching a cyber attack as a prelude to kinetic warfare; and political gain by embarrassing a rival, manipulating public perception prior to a key election, or suppressing suspected dissident citizen groups.

In order to ensure that services are highly available and reliable it may be necessary to adapt a strategy that includes technology designed specifically to address the availability, reliability, and scalability issues: an Application Delivery Controller (ADC).

Authentication is a growing requirement in this new era of heightened technology security. What is authentication and how can it be implemented in your environment to meet all of your application needs?

Fast, reliable access to data is a necessity in enterprise file storage environments today. However, many environments are beset by bottlenecks that slow application performance and negatively impact productivity. While these problems are particularly acute in dataintensive environments such as digital media, electronic design automation, oil and gas, and financial analysis, they are not unique to such environments and impact many diverse applications across a wide range of enterprises.

This paper discusses an alternative architecture that supports data center automation and dynamic provisioning without operating system virtualization.

Cloud computing offers IT another tool to deliver applications. While enticing, challenges still exist in making sure the application is always available. F5’s flexible, unified solutions ensure high availability for cloud deployments.

This White Paper describes how you can use F5 BIG-IP iRules and the Rate Shaping feature of the BIG-IP LTM system to identify different types of traffic for individualized control that can return double-digit capacity without spending a dime on additional bandwidth.

Benefits of BIG-IP Application Optimization Over the WAN

As an advanced ADC, F5 BIG-IP v10.1 provides sophisticated, integrated, contextual application management on a single platform. This modular architecture enables IT departments to make the most of their application delivery infrastructure, saving capital and operational costs through the lifespan of the application. As data centers continue to grow in complexity and shrink in footprint, integration of services will become a critical component during planning and execution. F5 BIG-IP v10.1 provides the level of integration today’s IT departments need to manage and control application delivery for users and services throughout the data center.

Although software-based Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) running within virtual machines have been available for some time, the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Virtual Edition (VE) is a full-featured vADC designed to work as an extension your existing physical F5 BIG-IP hardware appliances.

Performance guidelines and testing results for the BIG-IP WAN Optimization module

BIG-IP devices have long been a tool for applying "rolling upgrades" to the applications and systems that sit behind the BIG-IP device. With Live Install, this "stage->reboot->go live" sequence can now be applied to the BIG-IP device directly, creating a rolling upgrade scenario like those of the application systems behind it. Live Install also enables snapshot versioning for future versions of the BIG-IP system, a critical feature for both production and testing environments.

A cloud-enabled infrastructure can help your organization seamlessly integrate cloud storage and maximize cost savings, while also offering significant benefits to your traditional file storage environments.

Building a dynamic, agile enterprise cloud can be a daunting task. F5 and IBM have created a reference architecture that will accelerate the design and deployment phases and help ensure a successful enterprise cloud architecture.

The modern SP needs tools and technology to help them start deploying NGN services today on their existing networks with a mindful-eye toward tomorrow. This White Paper describes how F5 Networks provides these tools and technologies and is already a major contributor to many existing SP networks providing cutting-edge technology.

There are three proactive measures you can take during the development of an application to ensure it is secure, fast, and available when it hits superstar status.

Eliminating the need for the browser to download content on repeat visits can greatly improve the performance of web applications. There are many factors that impact whether or not content can or will be retrieved from the local browser cache on repeat visits, including the browser settings, the web site, and the user's behavior. This White Paper shows how the BIG-IP WebAccelerator can improve the utilization of the user's cache without needing to change the application.

As the supply of IPv4 addresses is rapidly depleting, communication service providers are employing unique solutions to optimize current networks and transition to IPv6. One of the more successful solutions organizations are using to address this issue is carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT). The F5 BIG-IP system provides unique scalability and flexibility to the CGNAT architecture, enabling service providers to offer more reliable and available service to their subscribers.

Cloud balancing evolves global server load balancing from traditional routing options based on static data to contextaware distribution across cloud-based services.

Because improvements in practical computer power lag far behind these exponential hardware improvements, the key to maintaining processor performance has become multiprocessor or multicore design. This White Paper details how the Clustered Multiprocessor (CMP) from F5, in combination with TMOS, provides customers with scalability, extensibility, adaptability, and manageability.

In April 2008, PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) publicly released a clarification on PCI DSS Requirement 6.6 and provided two possible options to use for business compliance. The compliance deadline for Requirement 6.6 remains on June 30th, 2008, and with released clarifications, companies now have enough information and options to develop a sound compliance strategy. This paper will examine the clarifications provided by PCI SSC and suggest the most effective and reliable ways to comply.

This White Paper explores the challenges that businesses face when deploying a multi-homed network and how the BIG-IP Link Controller provides a cost effective solution to not only manage availability, but also to optimize the performance of ISP connectivity in an operationally efficient manner.

This White Paper describes how the BIG-IP LTM system help organizations migrate to IPv6, and can operate as an IPv4 to IPv6 gateway; operating identically in either environment, and within mixed environments. This capability is ideal for organizations that are either actively planning for or anticipating an IPv4 to IPv6 transition.

F5 Networks' perspective on cloud computing: definition, architecture, and development. Cloud computing is not a revolution. It is an evolution that has been ongoing for well over a decade, if not since the very beginning of electronic computing. The cloud is simply an architectural model that employs many of the same components used in datacenters around the world today in a more flexible, responsive, and efficient way. The primary difference is in how these components are tied together with a dynamic control plane which helps enlighten and inform the architecture about the rapidly changing requirements of today’s applications, data and clients.

Cookies and sessions are the most useful hack invented, allowing HTTP to become stateful and applications to work on the web. But it is persistence that ties the two together and makes the web what it is today. This White Paper describes cookies, sessions and persistence, and the relationship between the three.

This paper explores why it is important to have deep insight into your file storage environment, and offers tips on how to develop a storage strategy that best meets your organization's needs. It also looks at how storage reporting and capacity forecasting tools can help you create a smarter storage strategy by automating the critically important but time consuming process of data capture and analysis.

The virtualization of network and application network infrastructure is the second wave of the virtualization tsunami to hit the shores of the data center. Unlike server virtualization, because of its unique role in the data center, Application Delivery Controller (ADC) virtualization brings with it architectural implications that make a simple virtual-for-physical replacement strategy unacceptable. But there are appropriate places across the data center and organization where virtualized ADCs can be leveraged as stand-alone solutions, as well as in conjunction with its physical predecessor, to enable a more dynamic data center without compromising reliability, scalability, and performance.

Storage snapshot technology is the foundation for modern data protection in the enterprise. The F5® ARX® file virtualization solution coordinates and federates snapshots across heterogeneous devices and volumes to simplify management and data protection in virtualized file storage environments.

This is a question and answer session with Erik Giesa, VP of Product Management and Marketing, on the topic of Data Center Virtualization.

Effective consolidation means more than simply reducing the number of boxes your company has in outlying offices and data centres. Efforts to reduce hardware infrastructure often result in degraded application performance-and thus unplanned expenditure-as it becomes necessary to optimise the infrastructure. F5's open architectural framework allows real control over your network to ensure applications are delivered exactly as intended.

The benefits of moving to a virtual desktop infrastructure can easily be negated by an unreliable or poorly performing implementation. A joint F5-Microsoft solution can improve performance, increase reliability, and enable the seamless scalability of a Microsoft VDI implementation.

Dell | F5 Microsoft Office Communications 2007 R2

F5 offers a variety of Application Ready Solutions to help organizations maximize the success of VMware View desktop projects. As a VMware partner, F5 has thoroughly tested and documented the benefits of using our Application Delivery Networks with VMware View 4.5. F5 solutions include secure access, single- sign-on, load balancing, and server health monitoring.

Managing applications in multiple data centers in real time can be a challenge, especially when the data centers are geographically distributed. F5 products such as BIG-IP^® Global Traffic Manager,^™ BIG-IP Link Controller^™, and BIG-IP^® WAN Optimization Module^™ help you manage and distribute applications between data centers.

DNSSEC ensures that the answer you receive when asking for name resolution comes from a trusted name server. Since DNSSEC is still far from being globally deployed and many resolvers either haven’t been updated or don’t support DNSSEC, implementing the BIG IP GTM DNSSEC feature can greatly enhance your DNS security right away. It can help you comply with federal DNSSEC mandates and help protect your valuable domain name and web properties from rogue servers sending invalid responses.

F5 and NetApp are reducing the cost and complexity of managing file storage. F5 ARX complements and enables transparent migration to the wide range of NetApp storage solutions.

This White Paper addresses the increased performance needs of a disaster recovery plan, and the common barriers to achieving success. It also addresses the performance gains that can be achieved by combining a F5 WANJet application acceleration solution with Double-Take® replication solutions from Double-Take Software.

Organizations can leverage a highly versatile virtualization technology in their file storage infrastructures to enable data mobility; improve storage efficiency and reduce costs; and seamlessly integrate new technologies such as data deduplication and cloud storage.

This integrated solution between F5 and VMware enables long distance VMotion for the first time between data centers and clouds. The solution works with your existing network and IT infrastructure; it does not require a re-architecture of your local or remote networks. This seamless solution uses existing technologies from both F5 and VMware to enable transparent live VM migration over long distances, guaranteeing the applications are migrated in a secure and optimized manner and always remain available before, during, and after the VMotion migration. Moving your applications and services transparently between clouds is now possible with F5 and VMware.

This White Paper describes the benefits of the F5 WebAccelerator for document distribution. The WebAccelerator is the only acceleration solution that resolves all document repository network access problems, whether local or remote, regardless of the enterprise environment.

The volume and sophistication of attacks that threaten business email networks and systems are growing at exponential rates. This White Paper describes the current types of email threats, why the exponential growth in email volume poses significant challenges for the corporate network infrastructure, and how adding a messaging security layer at the network edge addresses these challenges and significantly strengthens an overall messaging security solution.

Leverage F5 and NetApp technologies to improve VMware application availability, enhance disaster avoidance, and simplify storage migration via long distance live migration.

This White Paper details how F5's FirePass controller enables enterprises to provide secure, reliable and intuitive remote access to corporate applications and data using standard web browser technology, without the headaches associated with time-consuming client software installation and configuration, or changes to server-side applications.

Today’s complex networks transmit massive amounts of data over lines that are not growing as fast as usage is. Any improvement an organization makes to the performance of their transport mechanism in terms of latency and loss also improves the overall system. Whether an organization is moving large amounts of data over a WAN link or communicating with customers through a web application, F5 has solutions to help improve throughput and mitigate the effects of latency.

As market leaders in the application delivery market and DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management (DDI) market respectively, F5 and Infoblox have teamed up to provide customers with a complete DNS solution. This solution provides superior DNS management capabilities, flexible intelligent global server load balancing, high performance scalable DNS, and complete DNSSEC signing for all zones.

This paper provides a blueprint for integrating F5’s BIG-IP Application Delivery Controller (ADC) with Microsoft System Center to establish a dynamic network infrastructure. By making the network visible to System Center, System Center can automatically manage application load optimization policies.

A 2011 breach of RSA networks resulted in a loss of data that could pose a threat to RSA SecurID two-factor authentication. F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) and BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) support the implementation of NSA recommendations for mitigating potential threats.

F5 pioneered the concept of breaking up data center virtualization technologies into eight unique categories within the data center. Any virtualization products or technologies implemented in the data center will fall into one of these eight categories. With this paper, F5 discusses how it has implemented these same technologies within its own product line, helping enterprises get closer to achieving their goal of a implementing a complete Virtual Data Center with F5's Application Delivery Networking products.

Together, F5 and SAP have thoroughly tested and demonstrated the benefits of the F5 Application Ready Network. Optimum performance of applications and the network leads to increased user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity. Ultimately, this means decreased costs and increased ROI for CIO’s and Business Application owners.

Storage tiering helps businesses cut costs by automatically migrating aged or reduced-value files to lower-cost storage. Combining file virtualization with deduplication storage provides a simple, fast, and economical path to effective storage tiering. This paper reviews best practices for integrating Data Domain and F5 solutions for long-term archiving and data protection.

F5 BIG-IP system hardware and software, which use the F5 TMOS operating system, are designed from the ground up to work together to provide total application security.

The enhancements and new features available in BIG-IP v10 make this one of the most exciting new releases of an Application Delivery Controller in many years. The move toward a unified, adaptable dynamic infrastructure cannot be achieved without many of the innovative new features available in the new version of the BIG-IP system and the enhancements to its manageability make BIG-IP v10 more efficient than ever.

Using the F5 BIG‑IP WAN Optimization Module (WOM), enterprises can increase efficiency, decrease backup windows, offload encryption, and improve wide area network throughput to distributed data centers

As SSL VPN technology becomes more mainstream and organizations extend their internal infrastructures to users who are not necessarily employees, Endpoint security has become an increasing concern. Allowing an infected device access onto the network is just as bad as allowing an invalid user to access proprietary internal information. This White Paper describes how F5 FirePass Endpoint Security prevents infected PCs, hosts, or users from connecting to the network, and much more.

Traditional application delivery has focused on how to manage the network for applications. F5 iApps is a revolutionary new way of focusing on how to manage application delivery through the network, thereby changing how applications are delivered across the data center.

iControl provides the means by which F5's BIG-IP platform can be automated, integrated, and flexible such that it can adapt in real-time to changing network and application infrastructure conditions inside and outside the data center. Whether you are building out a new infrastructure or adapting to new technology, using iControl can enable unprecedented levels of control over and visibility into the application delivery process.

This White Paper shows how an F5 BIG-IP WebAccelerator can significantly reduce the variability of a fee-based CDN while offering additional performance enhancements not available from traditional CDN vendors.

This White Paper shows how understanding HTTP, and how these headers control behavior of web-based applications, can lead to better end-user performance, as well as making it easier to choose an application acceleration solution that addresses the shortcomings of HTTP and browser-based solutions.

The increasingly global nature of content and the migration of multimedia content distribution from typical broadcast channels to the Internet make geolocation a requirement for enforcing access restrictions and for providing the basis for traditional performance-enhancing and disaster recovery solutions. Both business and technical stakeholders will find value and a broad range of uses for the highly accurate data available from a trusted third-party geolocation provider, especially when the data is integrated into a Unified Application and Data Delivery platform.

This paper covers the F5 FirePass integration with FullArmor's GPAnywhere. FullArmor is a leading provider of enterprise policy management on the Microsoft Windows platform. This paper also details Group Policy Objects.

This paper discusses decreasing the impact of hardware on the environment and IT's bottom line through more efficient and better performing application delivery platforms.

By working with VMware and by providing a robust Application Delivery Networking infrastructure for virtual machines and platforms, F5 BIG-IP LTM and BIG-IP GTM provide the backbone for application delivery inside and out of the cloud with solutions such as vCloud. BIG-IP products work in concert across the entire application stack—from BIG-IP LTM monitoring application health and managing local user connections through BIG-IP GTM distributing those connections across the globe. Together, they deliver applications running in the cloud on VMware virtual platforms to meet changing business needs.

Applying the concepts of environmental-friendly policies to the data center through application delivery to green up your organization. If you’re truly interested in going green—whether environmentally, financially, or simply because you feel it’s the right thing to do—consider the benefits of an Application Delivery Controller. Going green isn’t just about devices and their power consumption; it’s about how much more efficient and green it can also make the rest of your infrastructure.

A comprehensive F5 solution readies application infrastructure for a successful implementation of there-engineered Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

To provide high-quality user experiences on the Internet, networks must be designed with optimized, secure, highly available, and high-performance IP services. Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most difficult, but important, IP services to optimize and secure. DNS Services in F5 BIG-IP version 11 provides an intelligent DNS architecture that delivers high performance and scalability while negating the effects of network attacks.

HIPAA, The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, requires healthcare organizations to take added precautions to ensure the security of their networks and the privacy of patient data. This White Paper provides an overview of HIPAA security compliance, explores how companies can mitigate their security risks and adapt a strong HIPAA compliant posture using F5 products, illustrates how F5 products map to specific HIPAA security rules, and explores some of the key reasons F5 products are unique in their ability to provide companies with a simple means to allow compliance with HIPAA.

How to Optimize Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Deployments with F5 BIG-IP

IBM and F5 Cloud Reference Guide

Deploying dynamic web applications in the enterprise offers significant benefits, but users may well experience unpredictable application performance. One cause of poor performance is server overload, which results from greater application usage and content complexity. This White Paper describes how the F5 WebAccelerator solves this key issue with its Dynamic Caching technology.

This White Paper discusses the impact that AJAX has on the Network, and how an application delivery controller, such as the BIG-IP LTM system, combined with an application firewall address the network, server, and security issues that will certainly arise with increased deployment of these new web-oriented rich applications.

Web services are definitely going to tax your network infrastructure. In the rush toward realizing the benefits of a Service Oriented Architecture via Web services, enterprise architects and developers must factor in the role the network plays in the successful delivery of Web services. This White Paper shows how F5 products can help reduce the burden of Web services on the network.

Improving Application Deployments | Forrester Consulting

Web application delays caused by network latency cannot be fixed by increasing bandwidth or increasing server capacity. This White Paper shows how F5's WebAccelerator solves this problem with its Intelligent Browser Referencing (IBR) technology, which is a group of capabilities that eliminates the need for the browser to download repetitive or duplicate data, and ensures the best use of bandwidth by controlling browser behavior.

By extending the capabilities of the F5 suite of products to include pre-built support of the core IMS needs, F5 is positioned to bring the same ease of design, deployment, and management to IMS that we have in enterprise architectures for more than a decade. This White Paper discusses how F5 provides security, performance, and availability to IP networks.

Application health monitors are now a tried and true technology of the Application Delivery Controller, yet traditional monitors require interaction with the application. Inband passive monitors change that requirement and monitor applications transparently.Inband passive monitors finally fuse together intelligence and performance; it's no longer an "or" decision, now it becomes an "and," enabling both application intelligence and performance to co-exist.

Compression technology can provide dramatic application performance improvements. This White Paper discusses the need for compression, the different approaches to compression available in the market today, and how F5's BIG-IP system provides organizations with a powerful way to optimize their bandwidth intelligently while accelerating the delivery of their applications.

Both Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Brute Force Attacks have existed for many years, and many network devices tout the ability to withstand them. However, most of today's DoS attacks target layer 7 (L7) by overwhelming applications with seemingly valid requests and Brute Force programs can send more than one million attempts per second. This paper will discuss how to intelligently mitigate these types of attacks.

F5 Data Manager helps enterprises monitor their heterogeneous file storage environments and understand how and why their file data is growing over time. With Data Manager’s unique software architecture, process workflow, and reporting tools, organizations can better manage file usage and storage.

This White Paper is written to achieve two main goals: to explain the basic vision/need for the IMS architecture and to give the reader a high-level understanding of how it works. In the end, the overarching goal is to help educate the reader on this burgeoning and powerful technology change.

The intent of this paper is to familiarize the reader with both the vision and need for SCTP. While it currently has a very limited use, its capabilities will soon prove too tempting, and SCTP adoption will grow quickly. Within IMS architecture, SCTP provides the call signaling over IP. The key benefits of SCTP, multi-homing and multi-streaming, will allow development of numerous new devices which include the ability to support and carry this new protocol.

The problems of DNS security have long been known, which is why DNSSEC was developed. However, it is only now that widespread deployment is possible as the internet infrastructure is being readied to accept DNSSEC lookups and tools are available to remove the complexity involved in its deployment.

As the use of IPv6 within the Internet grows, the basic concept of IP address configuration and use becomes critical to all organizations. This White Paper gives a detailed introduction to IPv6.

This White Paper describes how F5's BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager can solve the challenges of a multi-service application infrastructure to provide maximum availability, reduce infrastructure costs and management overhead, and improve application performance for a superior end-user experience.

F5 BIG-IP LTM with ACA in Kerberos protocol transition and constrained delegation architectures allows for a more scalable, efficient and secure infrastructure capable of federating access to services across domains and authentication realms, ultimately decreasing the capital and operational expenditures required to keep applications secure, fast, and available.

There are many advantages to deploying firewalls, in particular, behind Application Delivery Controllers. This white paper will show how you can implement ADCs in a “firewall sandwich” to improve availability, scalability, and manageability across the IT infrastructure.

The pervasiveness of load balancing technology does not mean it is universally understood, nor is it typically discussed other than from a basic, network-centric viewpoint. This White Paper thoroughly explains load balancing and strips away some of the mystery and magic from basic load balancing practices.

One of the unfortunate effects of the continued evolution of the load balancer into today's application delivery controller (ADC) is that it is often too easy to forget the basic problem for which load balancers were originally created-producing highly available, scalable, and predictable application services. This White Paper describes the Evolution of load balancing devices to Application Delivery Controllers.

Information security personnel suffer from information overload on a nearly daily basis, but need to sift through myriad articles, reports, blogs, logs, and scans to do their jobs. Information is vital to successful web application security strategies, whether it be information about a new attack, a new twist on an existing attack, or identifying weak points in web applications. Investments in security solutions have to provide a clear value, which equals additional time spent collecting and documenting proof of this value. The latest version of F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager(tm) (ASM), v10.1, addresses information overload and the need for agility in implementation.

Many organizations choose to run data traffic and network management traffic over the same network links. This paper will discuss why it is critically important to segregate network management and control data traffic to ensure that problems can be solved even when the network is melting.

By working collaboratively with partners that build some of the most widely deployed network management tools in the industry, F5 provides the bridge between application system and network infrastructure management. Using third-party tools such as HP Network Node Manager i and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, it has never been easier to manage F5 BIG-IP devices.

Improve performance, implement security procedures, and institute server redundancy that is invisible to the user by leveraging the strategic point of control that exists between the servers in the data center and the Internet.

The ability to load balance some protocols requires a deep understanding of the way in which the applications that use those protocols behave. Protocols that are both asynchronous and communicate bidirectionally are challenging to scale for most load balancing solutions because they do not have the ability to extract and route requests at a message level and are inherently tied by their architecture to load balancing based on connections. F5 TMOS architecture provides the means by which F5 is able to quickly implement support for message-based protocols such as Diameter, RADIUS, and LDAP. TMOS enables BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to extract and act upon message-level information, providing turnkey scalability and high availability while maintaining the ability to extend and adapt that functionality through iRules.

This document is a best practices guide for a Microsoft Hyper-V dynamic data center scenario in an HP BladeSystem environment. This document discusses integration of Microsoft, F5 Networks and HP products and tools in a dynamic data center.,x-default

The goal of this white paper is to help customers begin to formulate an idea of the hardware design for their OCS 2007 deployments on the HP BladeSystem. Building from the base OCS 2007 Standard Edition up to the OCS 2007 Enterprise Edition installation, the HP BladeSystem provides a modular platform to help reduce the costs associated with deploying OCS versus traditional rack or tower architectures. Whether a remote office or a large data center, the HP BladeSystem can provide an infrastructure that meets the needs of the customer.

This testing shows that deploying an OCS Consolidated Configuration as defined on HP BladeSystem and StorageWorks for 30,000 users with this profile should provide a very positive user experience. This is a solution that businesses can deploy and grow in to. There are server and CPU resources to spare to allow for growth as users become more accustom to the features and expand the way they use the system.

The Backup and Restoration documentation for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd572319(office.13).aspx) includes guidelines and best practices for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 disaster recovery.

This paper details the results of using one such solution – the F5 Networks® BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM™). By enabling the WebAccelerator™ module on BIG-IP LTM, test results showed a significant increase in user-perceived performance while at the same time decreasing the load on the WFEs.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

This white paper is intended to shed light on the issues affecting application performance in the wide area, and to give IT managers the knowledge required to design strategic enterprise application acceleration and deployment solutions.

To fully maximize the potential of virtualization and the cloud, organizations must take a more holistic approach to their Application Delivery Network. The F5 dynamic services model provides a foundation of reusable services that can understand the context of each transaction regardless of user, device, or location. The IBM Services portfolio leverages F5 products to align business requirements with technology.

This White Paper details F5's Advanced Client Authentication software module. This module, for use with the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, provides client authentication of HTTP and other traffic types for a variety of authentication schemes, including LDAP, Radius, TACAS, SSL, and OCSP.

Bandwidth-efficient client server applications have been replaced with bandwidth-demanding web applications, which can put a strain on your infrastructure. Maximize your network and application delivery with WAN optimization.

F5's BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager provides a state-of-the-art TCP/IP stack that delivers dramatic WAN and LAN application performance improvements for real-world networks. This highly optimized TCP/IP stack, called TCP Express, combines cutting-edge TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with numerous improvements and extensions developed by F5 to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery.

By architecting data center infrastructure to be as nimble and agile as possible, IBM and F5 enable enterprises to better react in real time to customer requirements and to position the customer for success. The combined strength of IBM and F5 tackles these challenges at the core of the infrastructure by creating a strategic point of control where the network, servers, storage, and security come together to create customized solutions that add significant business value.

Despite the advent of snapshot and other disk-based backup technologies, tape backup remains an integral component of data protection for enterprises. Intelligent file virtualization integrates with existing backup solutions to optimize tape-based data protection in today’s enterprise.

This white paper addresses the performance needs of data replication for disaster recovery, and the common barriers to achieving success. It also addresses the dramatic performance gains that can be achieved by combining the F5 WANJet application acceleration solution with the EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) family of remote storage replication solutions.

New functionality in BIG-IP v10--such as resource provisioning and route domains--coupled with existing administrative domain capabilities enables IT to virtualize application delivery functions across departments. Sharing the investment in a unified application delivery solution across business constituents increases the return on investment while reducing the complexity inherent in managing multiple devices.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager helps reduce the impact on the WAN from VDI by working with VMware's client and server components and optimizing the connection between users and their VDI virtual machines. When deployed in a branch scenario, BIG-IP LTM, iSessions, and BIG-IP WOM can control the amount of data that is passed back and forth between the branches, removing redundant application data and optimizing unique data for the client desktop.

Health monitoring, or the ability to verify that back-end systems are operational, is a basic tenant of load balancing and therefore critical to Application Delivery Controllers. This White Paper describes passive monitoring, and F5's monitoring solutions.

Phishing scams have become a sad fact of life – but developers can stop them, with a little help. If you own F5’s BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager running version 9 or later, you already have the ability to make use of F5’s custom, in-line scripting language, iRules. And now there’s a new iRule available that has been designed to help stop phishing in its tracks.

Delivering applications to remote users is a significant undertaking. Applications need to be available, and they must be delivered securely and quickly. Through a range of products, F5 has solved the security plus acceleration challenge for remote users with BIG-IP Edge Gateway and BIG-IP APM.

F5 ARX solutions dramatically reduce capital and operating expenses associated with managing file storage environments. Companies that have deployed ARX solutions have realized significant cost savings in several ways, including through greater use of lower cost storage with storage tiering, reduced backup media consumption from backup optimization, improved resource utilization, and simplified storage administration.

BIG-IP resource provisioning combines the best features of each virtualization model by enabling BIG-IP LTM modules to run sandboxed without sharing resources, while giving them the ability to dynamical scale if/when needed. Resource provisioning is a new model in hardware virtualization, one that will change the face of application delivery and Application Delivery Controllers moving forward.

This White Paper shows how several Service Provider drawbacks can be overcome when using F5's FirePass SSL VPN product, and elaborates on FirePass deployment in various service provider networks.

Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is a foundation for the current convergence of communications. This White Paper discusses RTSP, and the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) RTSP proxy service.

This document is intended to educate the reader on networking best practices and concepts for deploying SAP applications in today’s extended enterprise environment. The goal is to help application and network infrastructure departments to better cooperate during the earliest planning stages of SAP deployments to ensure these mission-critical applications are implemented in the most secure, reliable, and highest performing ways possible.

This paper addresses the challenges and solutions when providing high-availability and scalability for SIP services. By choosing the right high-availability solution for SIP environments, organizations can ensure reliable services while maintaining the ability to rapidly support new functionality and infrastructure without sacrificing uptime or quality.

Rapid growth of the mobile and remote workforce is driving organizations’ need to support tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single appliance. To this end, F5 developed a high-performance, high-concurrency SSL VPN in BIG-IP Edge Gateway and BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) to help enterprise IT migrate existing remote access solutions.

This technical brief describes how the BIG-IP Edge Portal app for iOS devices provides simple, streamlined access to web applications that reside behind BIG-IP APM, without requiring full VPN access, to simplify login for users and provide a new layer of control for administrators.

Global access to corporate applications is critical to an organization. The range of users, devices, and their locations requires stringent application access control to securely connect any user on any device from any location to wherever the application lives.,x-default

Cloud computing has become another key resource for IT deployments, but there is still fear of securing applications and data in the cloud. With F5 devices, you can keep your most precious assets safe, no matter where they live.

This White Paper describes how the BIG-IP system provides a holistic and integrated approach to securing your network and applications against potential application-level and network-level threats and attacks. The BIG-IP system is deployed as a critical gateway to your most precious resources: the applications and networks that run your business.

Industry experts have long debated which is a better defense mechanism in defending against Internet based attacks: a web application firewall (WAF) like F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) or an intrusion detection or prevention system (IDS/IPS). But the most ideal scenario would include a WAF and an IDS/IPS. The key to a successful security plan is not to provide the best security at one layer, but the best security at all layers.

F5's unified web application security and acceleration in BIG-IPv10 offers an unmatched solution for directing, securing, and accelerating web applications. Using the unified web application security and acceleration solution, a single proxy secures, accelerates, optimizes, and ensures application availability for all your critical web applications.

The concepts behind application and operation system virtualization are not new concepts, they have been around long before server appliances and desktop PCs were readily available in our daily vocabulary. The recent rate of virtualization adoption however, especially that of software operating system virtualization, has grown exponentially in the past few years. This White Paper describes some of the security implications of the virtual datacenter.

With F5 solutions, organizations can provide employees with reliable and secure access to email, from wherever they are, no matter what type of device they're using. Employees can rely on email that is efficiently delivered, with minimal latency times and a dramatic improvement in performance. Organizations can also reduce their bandwidth expenditures, use fewer server resources, and lower their overall infrastructure costs.

Service providers must constantly balance the cost of providing differentiated services, maintaining average revenue per user (ARPU), and the demands of subscribers for a higher quality of experience, even in the face of explosive growth and demand. Service Delivery Networking presents a new way to address many of these unique challenges.

The key to SIP is that it provides only five functions: user location, user availability, user capabilities, session setup, and session management. This White Paper defines SIP and discusses these five functions.

The ability to provide new and creative methods of communications has ensured an SIP presence in almost every organization. The F5's message-based load balancing ensures a good user experience by maintaining the connection from the user's device to the server, and enables growth and performance analysis while eliminating downtime.

One of the pillars of the Virtual Data Center is virtual platform infrastructure, or the virtual machine; however virtual platforms are dependent on many other, oft forgotten components of both the physical and virtual data center. This White Paper details seven data center challenges before deploying a virtual data center.

Unified, ubiquitous access has historically been out of reach and enterprises are clamoring for a single appliance to handle all their secure access needs. Typically companies needed multiple single purpose devices to handle their access needs...until now. This white paper discusses unified access strategies, challenges and solutions within the network and access management industry. It defines the depth and breadth of the challenges with current access needs and how new solutions may solve them.

F5 ARX solutions complement NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault technologies to provide simple and effective data protection across virtualized file storage environments.

Implementing single sign-on supported by Active Directory to manage application access in multi-domain environments across a diverse set of devices, applications, and services is challenging. An F5 BIG-IP APM and Microsoft Active Directory solution simplifies operational configuration while consolidating identity and application access management.

This paper defines high availability and reliability in SIP-based services and discusses techniques of designing and building reliable SIP networks.

The Simple Network Management Protocol defines a method for managing devices that connect to IP networks. The "simple" in SNMP refers to the requirements for a managed device, not the protocol. This white paper defines the history, frequently used terms, and implementation of SNMP.

The purpose of this paper is to document the infrastructure components and their relationships to each other-as well as to core SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) application components-that are necessary to enable the successful implementation of a robust SOA.

The benefits of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) have been well documented, but the challenges associated with an enterprise wide SOA deployment have not. While the distributed nature of a SOA encourages reuse and provides a high level of agility for the business, it can also give rise to real challenges in the delivery of SOA-based applications.

The reasons to investigate, and probably to deploy, an SSL-based VPN are numerous and compelling. They provide easier deployment and ongoing management, more reliable and consistent connections regardless of originating network and a host of new tools to help you provide more robust and appropriate security. All of this drives the numbers of lower TCO and quicker ROI-things the business, and you, should really be concerned with.

Companies around the world recognize the importance of protecting business data from disaster, hardware failures, human error, or data corruption. Oracle provides a variety of strategic solutions to safeguard databases; manage backup, replication, and restoration; and ensure availability of mission-critical information. These Oracle 11g Database Replication Solutions include Oracle Data Guard, Oracle GoldenGate, Recovery Manager, and Oracle Streams.

The detection of SQL injection attacks has primarily been accomplished through pattern matching techniques against signatures and keywords known to be malicious. Until recently, this technique has been successful. Now attackers are hiding their malicious intent in a variety of ways to escape detection. This White Paper discusses SQL Injection attacks, and how BIG-IP Application Security Manager technology can help prevent them.

If you are currently using an SSL VPN solution for remote access, you already have a robust wireless access solution in place. This White Paper describes the benefits of using an existing SSL VPN solution for secure wireless LAN access.

The U.S. government wants to transform its IT organization to streamline operations and smooth the transition to the data center of the future. To this end, it is moving an increasing number of applications to the cloud; minimizing duplicated IT efforts; and improving the dialogue between federal providers and contracting personnel—all with the goal of making government IT resources more flexible, reliable, and secure.

Web application security is critical—the data that web servers and their back-end databases house is invaluable to an enterprise. An organization must be able to control who can access their resources and when, as well as audit that information. F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), in conjunction with Oracle Access Management (OAM), helps centralize web application authentication and authorization services, streamline access management, and reduce infrastructure costs.

As applications and storage move out to the cloud, performance of the corporate communications link between the data center and the cloud will become more important. Optimizing transfers to the cloud with symmetric WAN optimization technology improves WAN communications performance and contains costly bandwidth upgrades.

F5 believes a new approach to infrastructure design must emerge—one that enables enterprises to add, remove, grow, and shrink IT services on demand, regardless of location. This new infrastructure must dynamically optimize the interaction between users and resources in the face of rapidly changing conditions. It must allow the IT enterprise to adapt quickly to changing organizational demands for security, data protection, ease of access, market responsiveness, low cost, and high performance.

F5 products and solutions enable organizations and cloud providers alike to build a strong infrastructure foundation that maximizes the use of resources while remaining agile enough to support both traditional and cloud computing architectures. The dynamic nature of F5 products enables organizations to build a cloud computing architecture that best suits their needs—whether the end goal is a public cloud offering or a private cloud implementation.

As attacks increase in both diversity and frequency, so have the failures of stateful security devices. An architecture based on the firewall services of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) effectively combats modern attacks.

As more organizations begin moving applications into the cloud, congestion will become an increasingly critical issue. F5 offers solutions for optimizing and accelerating applications in the cloud, making them fast and available wherever they reside.

This Meta Group White Paper describes how new approaches to application delivery - such as service-oriented architectures, peer-to-peer, and grid computing - are radically changing the flow of traffic between points on the network.

TMOS -- the foundation and architecture for F5's application delivery controllers running on the BIG-IP platform -- brings a wealth of security to existing application delivery networks. But before the secure implementation of TMOS can be discussed, the question is often asked "How is TMOS itself secured?" This White Paper provides the answer.

This White Paper details F5's TMOS architecture, a collection of real-time features and functions, purpose-built and designed as a full-proxy solution with the power and performance required in today's network infrastructure.

Nearly all WAN optimization appliances leverage advanced compression routines to improve application performance. At a high level, they all store and leverage previously transferred network data to achieve high compression ratios. When examined further though, how they achieve these gains, and their resulting limitations, varies widely. This White Paper describes how F5's BIG-IP WAN Optimization Module and TDR technology improves application performance.

This White Paper discusses the concept of Unified Access Control or Network Admission Control within the information security and network architecture industries. It defines the depth and breadth of the pitfalls with current architectures and how new solutions may solve them.

BIG-IP Edge Gateway is a game changer in the secure connectivity market, providing the next generation of highly scalable integrated remote access and advanced acceleration capabilities. BIG-IP Edge Gateway brings together necessary edge services, remote access, site-to-site security, WAN optimization, and web acceleration. BIG-IP Edge Gateway gives you secure, accelerated, and highly available applications around the world—whether at home on the road.

This paper outlines F5's vision for a new approach to Unified Application and Data Delivery Services, explores the business benefits of such an approach, defines an architecture to deliver those services, and outlines a roadmap for implementation.

By providing a unified Application Delivery Networking platform, F5 BIG-IP offers the ability for organizations to adopt a single platform for all its application delivery needs. Adopting an organizational standard for application delivery can reduce management and administrative costs and improve the ability of the organization to migrate smoothly from traditional to emerging application architectures, and address the unforeseen issues that always arise in the wake of the introduction of new initiatives.

While it is important to understand the numerous benefits F5's BIG-IP application delivery networking products bring to an organization, such as high availability, improving application performance, optimizing infrastructure, and providing unique application security, the goal of this White Paper is to explore a more fundamental business and technical problem plaguing today's organizations and how BIG-IP, specifically version 9.4 and the 8800 platform, solves it.

The F5 universal access approach is based on F5's FirePass product, Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network (SSL VPN), which is integrated with F5's BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager. This integration establishes F5 as the only vendor in the industry that can unify and centralize security and access control for remote, wireless LAN (WLAN), and Local Area Network (LAN) users, while scaling to meet the throughput requirements for unified access.

F5’s dynamic control plane is a real-world embodiment of the dynamic services model. F5 solutions provide IT organizations the ability to grow beyond static data centers, manage movement and migration of their applications and data down the hall or around the world, support demanding and ever-increasing mobile users, offer centralized and consistent security enforcement and global, dynamic measurement of real-time application performance. With this approach, F5 customers are better equipped to mitigate the complexity and costs of the move toward cloud computing, enabling them to unleash the true potential of on-demand IT.

Application performance depends on much more than speeding communication between the browser and the server. Modern application infrastructures include storage, the WAN connection, and the minute-by-minute workload on both. If the application front end is accelerated but the behind-the-scenes architecture is slowing application response time, then much of the value of any front-end investment is lost. By optimizing strategic points of control in the network, F5 products can help an enterprise leverage those front-end investments, accelerate the entire application infrastructure, and introduce a layer of agility that is just not possible with traditional architectures.

The amount of file data in the enterprise is growing at unprecedented rates. In addition, data is being retained for longer periods of time due to business and regulatory constraints. While not all this data is critical to the day-to-day business operations of the organization, it must all be stored, protected and remain readily accessible should the need arise.

The goal of virtualization in the data center is to help the enterprise achieve a business goal, whether that goal is consolidation, reduced management and head count costs, disaster recovery, or even “going green.” And with this, the pinnacle of virtual solutions is to architect and deploy the complete Virtual Data Center.

The new F5 VIPRION chassis brings not only performance and capabilities beyond today's demands, but also creates cost efficiencies that will appeal to accountants and management everywhere. This White Paper highlights some unexpected savings that the deployment of the VIPRION system brings to the table.

Clustered Multiprocessing (CMP) technology introduced by F5 in 2008 enabled organizations to consolidate physical, purpose-built resources into a single virtual entity that provides near 1:1 scaling of performance by simply adding or upgrading resource blades. Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing (vCMP), the industry’s first purpose-built hypervisor, completes this functionality by allowing administrators to completely segment those resources into independent, virtual ADCs.

This white paper describes the five different levels of virtual data center maturity progession.

This White Paper focuses on virtualization as it pertains to the data center. Before considering any type of data center virtualization, it's important to define what technology or category of service you're trying to virtualize. This White Paper describes eight different categories of virtualization so readers thoroughly understand the differences (and similarities) between the definitions of virtualization.

VMware Infrastructure products provide the next generation virtual platform for the new data center, but they don't virtualize the network or application delivery. This White Paper details how the F5 BIG-IP LTM works with VMware to provide truly virtualized Application Delivery Networking.

This White Paper discusses new technology developed by WhiteHat Security and F5 Networks that enables organizations to immediately mitigate discovered vulnerabilities using a web application firewall.

Targeted attacks are growing and companies are scrambling to protect critical web applications. Both a vulnerability scanner and a web application firewall are required to properly secure web applications—and F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) offers both on a single platform.

The demand for (and benefits of) web-based interfaces combined with an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce has exposed inefficiencies inherent in the browser, the network and its protocols, and the data center. These inefficiencies create performance problems for applications that continue to be magnified by emerging technologies like Web 2.0 and SOA. This White Paper details how F5's approach to Application Delivery Networking eliminates the bottlenecks inherent in browsers, in the network, and in the data.

Companies today are moving more and more of their mission-critical applications and data into web browsers. This paper explores some of the underlying reasons for the emerging vulnerabilities in web applications, illustrates some of the ways hackers commonly exploit them, and suggests a few ways in which companies can mitigate their risks.

The introduction of BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) version 9.4.2 marks a major step forward. This White Paper describes the new version of ASM and its new XML firewall features.

Private cloud computing may not offer the same degree of cost savings as public cloud computing, but greater flexibility and time savings will outweigh less significant cost savings in the long term. A joint F5-IBM cloud computing solution based on proven technology and standards can help you get to the private cloud faster.

Any site that stores data is at risk for exploitation. However, these interactive sites are a healthy breeding ground for attacks that attempt to use the data storage capabilities to reach a wide audience for the purpose of spreading malicious code and enticing users to share sensitive information. This White Paper discusses XSS attacks, and how BIG-IP Application Security Manager technology can help prevent them.