F5 Networks Moves to Consolidate Services

According to Jason Needham, F5 Networks senior director of product management, F5 Networks is looking to extend its position in the data center as an arbiter of traffic to deliver additional capabilities that will allow IT organizations to eliminate the need for separate access control, data deduplication and application acceleration appliances. In addition, F5 Networks is also providing geo-location services in partnership with Quova that will now allow IT organizations to apply polices based on where a user is located.

F5 Networks is trying to expand the reach of its technology beyond the data center with a new BIG-IP Edge Gateway that extends the company’s network services out to the edge of the network. According to Needham, this new appliance works in concert with the rest of the F5 Network infrastructure to optimize application traffic from mobile and remote users before it reaches the data center.

The F5 Network products are riding a wave of expansion of raw processor horsepower in a variety of network devices that is fueling a movement to save costs by consolidating various network and security appliances. Taken together Needham said the new F5 Network products are designed to allow IT organizations to eliminate “the Conga line of processing” that takes place on enterprise networks, given all the appliances that are dedicated to managing security and application performance. This is accomplished in the case of security, for example, by making all these services available via an Access Policy Manager that defines security polices under an integrated F5 Networks architecture.

F5 Networks is also rolling out application templates that simplify the deployment of F5 Network infrastructure in SAP Dynamics and Microsoft Exchange 2010 environments.