Powerful Choices for Service Providers: F5 Partners with IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem

As a market leader enabling network transformation, and a trusted partner to Communication Service Providers (CSPs) worldwide, this is exciting news—IBM shared an announcement that F5 is joining its telco network cloud ecosystem deployed on Red Hat Openstack and Red Hat Openshift infrastructure. This joint commitment to open networking will offer another level of customer empowerment across the networking ecosystem.

Shared Values of Providing Open, Flexible Choices

This new partnership area is significant as it casts a global spotlight on the shared values of both F5 and IBM to enable Service Providers with broader choices of modern architectures and infrastructures—with both hardware and software options to enable open source hybrid cloud containers and innovate toward rapid network transformation. Our mutual goals are purposeful design for flexibility and smooth multi-vendor interoperability, with a commitment to consistent processes supporting rigorous management and orchestration policies for operational efficiency. This open design also offers portability across clouds (private, public, hybrid) while adhering to the same security policies.

Cloud Application Services and Security

F5’s network virtualization strengths align with this platform, particularly with NGINX, in cloud-native solutions, virtualization, service mesh, container ingress, and security at every layer. NGINX Ingress Operator has achieved Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification, providing users with confidence that critical software components running on Red Hat OpenShift can be deployed and managed across both private and public clouds. This combination offers flexible and adaptable toolsets to offer rapid scale for agile software-defined infrastructures of modern networks, which provide volumetric throughput demand for the 5G marketplace.

Learn more about F5’s Service Provider cloud options—like our automated NFV solution packages for firewalls or DNS. Or read more about IBM’s telco cloud network ecosystem.

Note: To better support our customers, this blog page will be updated as new features are rolled out, pointing to other useful options for Service Providers to leverage the security and flexibility of this platform.

James Feger is GM, Service Provider, F5