F5 Offers Business-Critical SDAS for Integrated Systems
Enterprises are increasingly seeking turnkey solutions that unite compute, storage, and server virtualization on a single platform. According to Gartner*, worldwide total integrated system spending will grow to $20.5 billion by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7% between 2014 and 2019. These integrated systems can help enterprises consolidate, simplify and scale their infrastructures, but may not address the application delivery services so essential to success. The F5® BIG-IP® system provides integrated systems customers with the Software Defined Application Services™ (SDAS) they need to ensure the high availability, security, and scalability required for today’s critical enterprise application workloads.
“Converged and hyper-converged infrastructures are increasingly gaining traction in the marketplace, representing both a significant opportunity for our business, and value delivered to our clients,” said Roger Singh, co-founder of Scalar. “F5’s application delivery services provide critical support for applications running on these systems.”
Integrated Systems Technology Alliances
Through ongoing collaboration with many of the world’s leading technology companies, F5 improves the delivery of application services, helps strengthen security, and enables more efficient deployment and management of enterprise applications. Specifically, F5 has partnered with two providers of hyper-converged infrastructure solutions—Nutanix and SimpliVity—to allow organizations to achieve the agility and scalability of the cloud plus the security and stability of on-premises solutions. Utilizing F5 application services to manage applications deployed using a hyper-converged Nutanix or SimpliVity platform, enterprises can simplify their virtual environments, provide unified secure access, boost application performance, improve productivity, and protect critical applications.
“Organizations expect the same or better performance and reliability with integrated systems that they’ve seen in the traditional IT stack,” said Keith McManigal, VP of Channel Sales, Americas, F5. “The BIG-IP software platform is flexible and programmable, allowing customers to realize the benefits of converged and hyper-converged infrastructures without compromising security or cost savings. Through innovative partnerships, F5 customers adopting an integrated systems approach can enjoy enterprise-class application delivery services commensurate with what they’d see in traditional and cloud-based deployments.”
Boost Performance and Increase Business Mobility
The BIG-IP system allows enterprises to maximize the performance and availability of applications in converged and hyper-converged environments with advanced optimization services, including TCP optimization, caching, compression, and support for HTTP/2. In addition, F5 technology allows organizations to deliver mission-critical application access services for application and desktop virtualization, mobile device management, and dynamic content collaboration solutions.
Provide Robust Application Security
Securing applications across converged, hyper-converged, and traditional infrastructures remains a key concern for enterprises using integrated systems. Using F5 technology, enterprises can leverage deeper intelligence and visibility to protect applications and mitigate risk by maintaining consistent security policies across a hybrid environment. Furthermore, organizations can benefit from secured and optimized site-to-site connectivity, insight and visibility into application traffic and advanced application health monitoring.
Support Key Enterprise Applications
Organizations can support the applications they rely on—including Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint—using the BIG-IP system’s customized application attack filtering, intelligent load balancing, SSL offloading and termination, TCP optimization, and scalability services. In particular, BIG-IP® Access Policy Manager® makes it easy for enterprises to provide policy-driven, centralized access control, as well as a simplified user experience by federating user identity across hybrid environments.
Enjoy Flexible Deployment Options
F5 empowers organizations to maximize the value of their converged and hyper-converged systems. Application deployment templates and a self-service model make it easy for IT to rapidly provision application delivery services in minutes, while hardware and software editions give enterprises both flexibility and performance enhancements for converged, hyper-converged, and traditional infrastructure deployments.
To learn more about how F5 can deliver SDAS in integrated systems, please visit the integrated systems page on f5.com.
*Gartner Forecast Analysis: Integrated Systems, Worldwide, 1Q15 Update. Published on August 5, 2015 by Adrian O’Connell