F5 BIG-IP iSeries Crushes Citrix and A10 SSL Performance

The SSL explosion, and the need for unbreakable encryption algorithms, has driven a major move to elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) cipher suites for perfect forward secrecy. But dealing with multiple cipher types—and a lack of high-performance ECC acceleration solutions—limits capacity, and causes slow application performance. This trade-off between security and performance is the bane of many a solution architect’s existence, and has taken down several prominent high-traffic websites.

With the release of the new BIG-IP iSeries platforms, F5 has taken a massive step forward in helping customers deliver an application delivery solution that doesn’t force them to choose between security and performance. When we subjected an iSeries machine to rigorous ECC performance testing in our labs, it performed five times faster than comparable devices by A10 and Citrix. Read the report here.

The key is the way iSeries handles ECC ciphers. This new platform continues our leadership in delivering comprehensive SSL solutions for our customers, including being the first ADC to support dedicated hardware offload of Diffie-Hellman elliptical curve cryptography (ECDHE). Along with faster performance, using hardware offload rather than software on a general purpose CPU enables iSeries to deliver more predictable performance.

If you’re looking for DevOps-like agility along with high ECC performance for both established and emerging apps in private and hybrid clouds, I encourage you to check out the results of our in-house performance testing. You can also read more about the range of BIG-IP iSeries platforms, and what they can bring to your app environment.