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F5 BIG-IP Availability on IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions

Craig Scarborough Miniatur
Craig Scarborough
Published October 09, 2017

The benefits of cloud are far-reaching and enterprises that embrace this technology do so for many reasons. For some, it’s the flexibility and agility that the cloud can afford to better respond to end-users needs on a global scale. For others, it may purely be an economic play. For most enterprises, the concept of cloud is well in the process of crossing the “chasm” from early adoption to early majority. Out of necessity, because every on-premises environment and every cloud is different, early adopters have had to individually establish best practices for their specific organization. Industry-wide standards have yet to assert themselves on a large scale, however, meaning there is potential risk, inherent any time that an application is moved from one environment to another.

To combat this, IBM and VMware joined forces in 2016 to create a single, unified, architecture that encompasses both the customer’s on-premises and cloud infrastructures.  Using technologies such as VMware’s vSphere, NSX and vSAN allow customers to deploy applications in the cloud just as they do in their own data center. Therefore, the same tools, capabilities and skillsets that are being used in-house to manage and control one’s infrastructure can now be utilized in the hybrid cloud. Best of all, this environment is created in hours, instead of weeks.

IBM has recognized that not only do enterprise clients need base infrastructure to move their applications to the cloud, just as important are the layer 4-7 services that exist to ensure applications run fast, secure and highly available. IBM has announced that, starting October 9th, 2017, F5’s BIG-IP platform will be made available as part of their monthly service model. This means that enterprise customers that are using VMware and F5’s BIG-IP can now replicate their application high availability, security, and access postures on a global scale.

The F5 BIG-IP on IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions includes:

  • Automation of BIG-IP onboarding and licensing.
  • Available bandwidths range from 25Mbps to 5Gbps
  • Full Good/Better/Best licensing. Customers will able to benefit from the full range of F5 services:
    • Application delivery, including local load balancing and optimization
    • Application security, including web application firewall and DDoS protection
    • Identity and access, federation, VPN and SSO
    • DNS services, including global load balancing, DNSSEC, DDoS protection, and DNS scaling
  • Monthly pricing, embracing an OPEX model


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