F5 Offers New Application Delivery Platforms with Superior Value, Flexibility, and Performance

BANGKOK- F5 Networks, the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), introduced the BIG-IP 1600 and 3600 hardware platforms, which deliver enhanced application delivery capabilities to meet a broad range of enterprise customer requirements. With new hardware offerings for advanced Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), F5 solutions now provide increased value to the customer through increased performance and integrated functionality at lower price points. These platforms complement the new release of BIG-IP software, also announced today, which features advanced security and increased ease of use.

"Application Delivery Controllers are no longer the exclusive domain of large enterprise organizations," said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "In today's environment, a wide range of companies are running sophisticated web-based applications to reach employees, partners, and customers, so poor performance or service interruptions can severely impact business processes and revenue opportunities. The announcement from F5 addresses these requirements by bringing top-tier application acceleration services to a wider range of businesses."

The new BIG-IP hardware devices expand F5's industry-leading BIG-IP product family, providing feature-rich platforms with lower price points and advanced functionality. These hardware platforms enable a broader set of customers to implement an enterprise-wide application delivery architecture, and offer roughly twice the performance of the previous entry-level BIG-IP devices. Integrated features such as IPv6 Gateway, Rate Shaping, Fast Cache, and improved compression and SSL capabilities simplify implementation and further reduce cost of ownership.

"The new BIG-IP 1600 and 3600 provide high performance and great functionality at tremendous value," said Dewayne McNair, CTO of RemitDATA, a provider of web-based solutions for health care organizations. "Our customers rely on our web-based data analytics tools and demand zero downtime. The new BIG-IP platforms allow us to achieve this while also improving application performance."

The BIG-IP 1600 and 3600 devices have dual-core processors and use F5's Clustered Multiprocessing (CMP) technology to achieve superior performance and enable advanced ADC functionality.  Highlights include:

Full-featured ADC right out of the box - Every 1600 and 3600 platform comes standard with Fast Cache, IPv6 Gateway, Rate Shaping, SSL Offload, and Compression features. This suite of features allows organizations to improve their application performance and offload servers while increasing availability and scalability.

Advanced security and acceleration - The 3600 platform is able to run BIG-IP Application Security Manager™ (ASM) or WebAccelerator as a module on BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).

Integrated basic protocol security option - Both new platforms are able to run the new BIG-IP Protocol Security Module (PSM).

Lower operating costs and greater efficiency - Both platforms boast approximately twice the performance of their predecessors without increasing their power, space, or cooling requirements. This allows organizations to consolidate devices and get more performance per watt. Detailed power consumption reports on the 1600 and 3600 are available.   

"As they grow, companies need to integrate advanced network and application delivery capabilities to remain agile in the face of shifting business conditions," said Jason Needham, senior director of Product Management. "Beyond basic load balancing, F5's advanced security and acceleration capabilities enable these companies to deploy integrated solutions, and keep these technologies integrated as they upgrade their infrastructures. Customers can now achieve enterprise-class security, optimization, and availability, where previously they may have had to settle for basic load balancing due to budget limitations. And unlike competitors' offerings, our products don't require customers to make tradeoffs between functionality and performance; they get the best of both in one unified system."