f5 Networks

F5 Networks is a global leader in secure, fast and uninterruptible delivery of applications to any location at any time. F5 products provide customers with the flexibility they need to adapt their IT environment or specific applications to changing business conditions. They help integrate different technologies, thereby improving infrastructure control, application delivery processes and data management. All this is done to provide users with secure and fast access to selected services from both corporate computers and mobile devices.

The company provides strategic control points for IT infrastructure, guarantees performance optimization, protection of business-critical applications and management of content distribution across corporate and wide area networks.

F5 Networks is unveiling a new method for building a flexible network infrastructure in which people, applications and data are able to adapt to business changes. The key here is to replace static one-to-one connections between technologies with an interaction that dynamically decides on the best connection taking into account current network conditions. F5 Networks is the first and only vendor to offer an open architecture, thus providing IT organizations with new opportunities to deliver business-critical services.

f5 networks functionality

F5 functionality is available on high-performance BIG-IP hardware platforms, modular VIPRION hardware platforms and virtual machines. It is defined by a number of modules that perform well-defined tasks. A distinctive and very important feature of F5 products is the ability to run multiple functional modules on a single hardware or virtual platform, which brings a number of both technological and business advantages.

A brief overview of the most important modules:

BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™

It is a load balancer – a solution of the Application Delivery Controller class, with features for full control of performance, availability and application security. LTM ensures the scalability of an enterprise’s network infrastructure. BIG-IP LTM has both static and dynamic load balancing methods using tracking of the current performance of servers in the group.

BIG-IP® Global Traffic Manager™

GTM provides high availability and traffic control between different data centers. He makes the best choice of service by redirecting user requests based on, for example, geolocation, device availability and performance. Above that, GTM using a high-performance DNS server can relieve and protect the current DNS infrastructure.

BIG-IP® Application Acceleration Manager™.

A set of very advanced and practical functions for accelerating the serving of http pages (e.g. compression, caching): for example, we can manage the size of graphics depending on the device from which the service is accessed (a different size may be for desktops, another will be sufficient for mobile devices). WAN optimization is also part of the solution, that is, between two F5 solutions in two separate DCs, we can create an optimization tunnel.

BIG-IP® Advanced Firewall Manager™.

It is an advanced solution from the Web Application Firewall family. It provides protection against application attacks and regulatory compliance without interfering with application code. It allows building positive and negative security policies to protect against application attacks. Protects against DDoS attacks – responds to real threats in real time because ASM takes into account page content delivery latency and the number of sessions per second when detecting attacks.

BIG-IP® Access Policy Manager®

It provides secure, content- and rule-based access control. Centralizes privilege management by simplifying authentication and authorization (AAA – Authentication, Authorization and Accounting). With its flexible and advanced application authorization features, it is more than a classic SSL VPN. It can be used, among other things. for authentication and automatic transfer of user privilege information between systems and applications, e.g. to external business entities (SAML).

What sets F5 Networks apart F5 is the only vendor offering an open architecture environment, offering organizations a new way to deliver services that represents real business value. This unique environment includes:

TMOS

F5 (Traffic Management Operating System) giving intelligence and complete control over how applications are delivered. A universal platform on which many products in the F5 portfolio are based. Provides high performance, and a broad spectrum of application control

iRules

an event-based scripting language that allows you to specify how traffic associated with specific applications is to be captured, processed, analyzed and routed.