Excellence at Scale: Transforming AI Infrastructure with F5 and MinIO’s Secure Data Delivery
Today's enterprises face both a challenge and an opportunity to transform vast amounts of data from AI, autonomous systems, and emerging workloads into meaningful business outcomes. Secure, optimized data delivery and high-performance object storage are essential to accelerate insights, optimize business performance, and maintain a competitive edge.
The expanded F5 and MinIO partnership brings together MinIO AIStor's high-performance, highly-scalable, S3-compatible object storage with the secure, intelligent traffic management of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). This joint solution delivers a comprehensive, secure, and scalable foundation for AI workloads, enabling businesses to achieve optimized data management, strengthened security, and flexible migration across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Understanding S3 and its importance for scalable data management
Simple Storage Service (S3) is the standard protocol for modern object storage, fully supported by AIStor and a key component of today's data architectures. Unlike traditional storage, S3 stores data as discrete objects in logical containers called buckets, paired with metadata for efficient organization and retrieval, which is critical for AI workloads.
Operating over HTTP/S, S3 is ideal for scalability, distributed deployments, and seamless cloud integration. It's widely used in data lakes, archives, media repositories, static websites, backups, and especially AI and machine learning pipelines, making S3-compatible storage a strategic business investment. Because S3 leverages HTTP/S as its transport protocol, businesses can directly benefit from F5's deep expertise and apply its industry-leading Layer 4-7 capabilities to S3 storage traffic.
Optimizing storage traffic with F5 BIG-IP for MinIO AIStor
As organizations utilize real-time and large-scale data for AI and enterprise workloads, efficient traffic management is critical. Powered by F5 ADSP, F5 BIG-IP’s intelligent load balancing technologies (e.g., LTM and DNS) prevent storage bottlenecks by distributing queries and traffic evenly, reducing latency, eliminating hotspots, and enabling consistent scalability.
BIG-IP also provides robust delivery and security for S3 storage traffic:
- Protect against HTTP/S-based threats with an advanced web application firewall (WAF) to safeguard critical business data and minimize risks.
- Defend against DDoS attacks to maximize availability and ensure continuous uptime.
- Offload SSL/TLS encryption to optimize security without impacting MinIO performance.
Across cloud, on-premises, or hybrid deployments, F5 and MinIO’s unified approach simplifies management, ensuring consistent performance and security.
Simplifying cloud-to-on-premises migration: The repatriation advantage
Businesses are increasingly moving workloads from public clouds back on-premises due to rising costs, compliance demands, data sovereignty, and performance predictability. This cloud-to-on-prem repatriation often requires significant application refactoring and architectural changes.
F5 BIG-IP and MinIO AIStor simplify this transition: AIStor's consistent S3-compatible API enables applications to migrate smoothly, while BIG-IP intelligently orchestrates incremental traffic shifts through DNS routing, allowing for phased, disruption-free migrations with minimal adjustments.
Extending strategic advantage across industries
From managing autonomous vehicle training data to powering healthcare analytics and financial compliance, the flexibility of the F5 and MinIO solution translates into a clear competitive advantage for organizations across industries.
For example, a major global automotive manufacturer is using the joint solution provided by F5 and MinIO to securely and reliably deliver and manage proprietary data from its vehicle fleets worldwide to AI factories. This enables continuous improvements to their AI models, providing significant business advantages. This powerful solution has enabled the manufacturer to save millions of dollars annually by repatriating the data from the public cloud. It has also reduced downtime, enhanced reliability, maximized ROI on AI infrastructure, and ensured secure management of exascale data. These benefits have empowered the automotive manufacturer to boost innovation and maintain a strong competitive edge.
F5's secure traffic management capabilities collect and route vehicle-generated data through F5-powered regional points of presence (PoPs), delivering it seamlessly into a centralized data lake powered by MinIO AIStor. MinIO's high-performance object storage solution forms the essential foundation for training AI models. Once models are trained and validated, they are delivered securely back to vehicle systems, with every step of the cycle delivered and protected by F5 infrastructure.
This large-scale deployment illustrates the significant advantage organizations in other industries can gain when adopting the joint approach of F5 and MinIO. For example, healthcare providers use secure, high-performance storage to enhance predictive analytics and medical imaging, improving patient outcomes through rapid, reliable data access. Financial institutions leverage BIG-IP’s security and MinIO’s security and scalability for compliant storage of large amounts of sensitive data, enabling AI-driven fraud detection and risk management. And companies with edge computing deployments count on F5 and MinIO for secure, low-latency data processing and storage—critical for IoT and smart industry use cases.
In short, F5 and MinIO together bring exceptional security, scalability, and straightforward repatriation capabilities to virtually any industry looking for transformative data management strategies.
Next steps: Unlocking strategic agility with F5 and MinIO
In today’s dynamic business environments, gaining a strategic advantage means confidently navigating the digital transformation landscape. Together, F5 and MinIO provide high-performance, resilient, secure object storage and intelligent traffic orchestration optimized for today’s most ambitious AI projects and mission-critical data workloads across many industries.
We invite you to experience firsthand how F5 and MinIO can transform your data management capabilities.
To learn more, read our press release. Also, be sure to check all of this week’s latest F5 AI news on our Accelerate AI webpage.