F5 Introduces Midrange VIPRION Platform And Industry's First Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing Technology

F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, recently announced the VIPRION 2400, a midrange chassis-based hardware platform. Adding to the successful F5 VIPRION product line, the new Application Delivery Controller (ADC) provides significant price/performance advantages for enterprises. In addition, F5 is announcing its new Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing (vCMP) technology that combines virtualization and multi-tenancy capabilities to help customers consolidate and efficiently manage application delivery services. Building on F5's previously announced Clustered Multiprocessing (CMP) technology, vCMP enables multiple instances of BIG-IP software to run on one device. VIPRION hardware platforms will support F5's unique vCMP capabilities.

With the VIPRION 2400's chassis-based architecture, customers enjoy enhanced availability features and the flexibility to scale their ADC infrastructures without changing network, application, or device configurations, leading to dramatically reduced OpEx. VIPRION running vCMP gives enterprises the unprecedented ability to have complete, logical separation of software versions and instances on a single, highly scalable device. This capability is critically important for large enterprises and cloud and service providers who need on-demand scalability and the ability to ensure that each group's resources and network traffic are fully isolated from one another.

"The new VIPRION 2400 provides industry leading performance at an attractive price point for enterprises," said Karl Triebes, SVP of Product Development and CTO at F5. "VIPRION customers will be able to take advantage of F5's vCMP technology, which enables IT staff to create independent and isolated virtual ADCs for each department, business unit, or client they need to support. This has a huge business impact because ADC resources can now be allocated to each group based on its unique requirements."

Details
The VIPRION 2400 is a midrange platform that enables a broader range of customers to take advantage of the inherent capabilities of the VIPRION architecture, including on-demand throughput, SSL processing, compression, and CPU resources. In addition, VIPRION solutions act as a SuperVIP—a virtual IP that can span multiple blades—enabling applications to harness the processing power of all the blades within the system. Because of this unique capability, VIPRION solutions with vCMP technology provide customers with carrier-class scalability and reliability.

Highlights of the New VIPRION 2400 Platform:

• Scalability to Support Growth without Disrupting Access
  Like all VIPRION platforms, the VIPRION 2400 enables customers to scale their ADC deployments without installing additional hardware devices, because new blades can be added to the chassis as needed. This provides a higher level of device resiliency because blades can be removed or taken offline without disrupting traffic. Customers can scale their infrastructures and respond to varying conditions without requiring the costly and time consuming network changes associated with other vendors' solutions. The VIPRION 2400 also includes integrated onboard management and I/O for each blade instead of requiring separate blades for management and I/O.
• High Performance, Energy Efficient Footprint for Lower TCO
  The VIPRION 2400 offers industry leading Layer 4 performance of 160 Gbps at a highly competitive price. VIPRION solutions offer significant performance advantages over competitors' solutions by forming a virtual processing fabric that utilizes all the available CPUs across every blade in the system. To achieve comparable performance with other vendors' solutions, IT teams would need to deploy additional devices, taking up valuable resources in the data center and increasing the management burden. With VIPRION solutions, each additional blade linearly increases resources and processing power and is immediately incorporated into the virtual processing fabric without any additional management overhead. In addition, the VIPRION 2400 is the first ADC to achieve 80 PLUS Gold Certification for energy efficiency.

Advantages of Combining VIPRION and Clustered Multiprocessing Technologies:

• Superior Flexibility to Support Varying Business Needs
  vCMP can run multiple instances and versions of BIG-IP, each completely isolated from the others, so individual groups in an organization have the flexibility to run the version of BIG-IP software that's most appropriate for their needs. In addition, they can upgrade their software and schedule downtime when it's appropriate for them rather than according to another groups' requirements.
• Superior Reliability and Fault Tolerance
  When different BIG-IP instances are striped across blades, CMP load balances traffic across each blade. In the unlikely event a blade goes down, the application continues to run and traffic continues to be processed on other blades without any disruption in service. This is not possible with other vendors' ADC solutions.
• A True "Pay as You Grow" Model
  With the ability to easily add blades to the VIPRION chassis, organizations no longer need to purchase a "throttled down" ADC and then pay for an additional license when their traffic needs increase. Instead, the VIPRION platform enables customers to transparently allocate the appropriate amount of resources by adding a new blade.

Additional Hardware and Virtual Edition Enhancements from F5
F5 is also introducing the BIG-IP 8950S platform. Expanding on the previously announced 8950 platform, the 8950S provides enhanced capabilities for organizations whose applications require extensive SSL processing. This is increasingly important for enterprise customers as they transition to 2048-bit SSL certificates, in line with the National Institute of Standards and Technology's recommendations.

In addition, F5 is expanding the hypervisor support available in its virtual appliances beyond VMware vSphere Hypervisor to include the addition of production and lab versions of Citrix XenServer 5.6 and the lab version of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. These new virtual solutions provide increased deployment flexibility, offering customers freedom to combine physical and virtual appliances in an integrated application delivery architecture for optimal efficiency, scalability, and reliability. Along these lines, F5 will continue to build out its growing portfolio of virtual appliances.

Availability and Additional Product Information
The VIPRION 2400 solution, which will be available in June 2011, will be on display at the Interop Las Vegas 2011 conference at F5's booth (#2027) in the main hall. With the introduction of the VIPRION 2400, the previously announced VIPRION hardware platform will now be branded as the VIPRION 4400. F5's Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing (vCMP) technology will be available early in the third quarter of calendar year 2011. The BIG-IP 8950S will be available in June 2011. Expanded hypervisor support for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Virtual Edition and BIG-IP Access Policy Manager for LTM Virtual Edition will be available in June 2011.

Additional Resources

• Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing (vCMP) White Paper
• VIPRION 2400 and vCMP SlideShare Presentation
• VIPRION 2400: Quantum Performance – Video
• vCMP: License to Virtualize – Video
• VIPRION Datasheet
• BIG-IP Hardware Datasheet

About F5 Networks
F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), helps the world's largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. F5 solutions help integrate disparate technologies to provide greater control of the infrastructure, improve application delivery and data management, and give users seamless, secure, and accelerated access to applications from their corporate desktops and smart devices. An open architectural framework enables F5 customers to apply business policies at "strategic points of control" across the IT infrastructure and into the public cloud. F5 products give customers the agility they need to align IT with changing business conditions, deploy scalable solutions on demand, and manage mobile access to data and services. Enterprises, service and cloud providers, and leading online companies worldwide rely on F5 to optimize their IT investments and drive business forward. For more information, visit www.f5.com.

SOURCE: F5 Networks, Inc.