Having been in the strategic alliance space for well over a decade, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of interesting technology partnerships over the years. The emerging partnership between Nutanix—a leader in the hyper-converged infrastructure market—and F5 is one that stands out as being particularly exciting. This collaboration will help mutual customers realize the benefits of web-scale architecture without sacrificing application availability, performance, and security.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be preparing a series of posts about how F5 is working with Nutanix and our other partners to manage applications deployed using integrated systems. Half of these posts will focus on the business benefits of combining the robust application delivery services of the BIG-IP system with the agility of hyper-converged infrastructures. The other half, written by technical experts here at F5, will go in-depth on the technical aspects of deploying BIG-IP on or alongside these hyper-converged platforms—you can check out the first of those posts about using Prism, the Nutanix management and operations platform, in conjunction with the BIG-IP system.
Enough introduction; let’s move on to the good stuff. Stuff like lowering CapEx and OpEx, simplifying management, and boosting overall IT agility—while continuing to provide a high level of security and performance. Here’s an overview of what the Nutanix and F5 partnership means for your business:
Increase Business Mobility
In today’s hyper-connected and fast-moving world, nearly every organization needs to support their workforce by delivering business mobility solutions through application and desktop virtualization, as well as mobile device management. By combining servers, storage, and management resources in a turnkey hyper-converged appliance, Nutanix makes it easy to support any virtualized environment, without the inefficiencies of overprovisioning or complexity of separate networked storage.
The next piece of the puzzle is ensuring that your users have fast, secure, and consistent access to the applications and desktops being deployed on Nutanix systems. That’s where F5 application delivery services come in. As they have for years, the extensive capabilities of the F5 BIG-IP platform continue to work seamlessly with leading business mobility applications like VMware Horizon, Microsoft RDP, Citrix XenDesktop, and Citrix XenApp, to name a few. So whether you deploy these applications using traditional or hyper-converged infrastructures, F5 helps you deliver application services, keep desktops and applications secure, and provide anywhere, anytime access to users from any device.
Secure Your Hyper-Converged Data Center
Another reason the Nutanix and F5 partnership is so compelling? With your IT department under constant pressure to speed workflows, reduce complexity, and cut costs, Nutanix’s agile, hyper-converged infrastructure delivers a great solution for your next-generation data center. Adding F5 BIG-IP comprehensive threat-mitigation functionality can help you protect your Internet-facing data center applications from the increasing sophistication, frequency, and diversity of today’s attacks. By combining F5 and Nutanix technology, you can get a comprehensive security solution to protect your mission-critical applications—wherever they reside.
Parting Thoughts
All in all, it’s a pretty eye-catching business proposition. And it’s just the beginning. In the coming days, I’ll be posting more about how combining Nutanix infrastructure and the application delivery services of the F5 BIG-IP system can help businesses everywhere reap the benefits of truly integrated systems.
Just a note for our mutual channel partners: good news for your customers is good news for you, too. (You’ll find a nice quote from Roger Singh, co-founder of Scalar, herethat speaks to this evolving opportunity.) The F5 and Nutanix partnership will enable you to forge better and stronger relationships with your customers by offering them infrastructure and application delivery services in a complete solution, while strengthening your position as a trusted strategic advisor.
If you are interested in learning more about the business benefits of the F5 and Nutanix partnership, check out the partnership overview. Last but certainly not least, visit the Nutanix blog to learn more about integrating F5 BIG-IP application delivery services specifically for VMware Horizon on Nutanix’s Xtreme Computing Platform.
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