Products

F5 Networks Big IP Family

The BIG-IP Product Family is also extraordinarily flexible and configurable. You choose which functions you want by selecting various BIG-IP product modules and BIG-IP feature modules. Depending on which modules and how much traffic capacity you need, you can choose from various BIG-IP hardware platforms.

F5 Networks BIG-IP Product Modules

• Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM): Spreads connections across multiple clustered servers, sending each connection to the server with the least load. This speeds transactions and improves the end-user experience.
• Global Traffic Manager™ (GTM): Automatically routes connections to alternate data centers if the main data center goes offline or becomes temporarily overloaded. This makes applications more responsive for each user, and also allows enterprises to make optimal use of multiple data centers.
• Link Controller™ (LC): Prevents costly downtime due to ISP problems or other link failures, by automatically switching traffic to alternate connections.
• Application Security Manager™ (ASM): Protects critical applications and their data by defending against application-specific attacks that ignore conventional firewalls.
• WebAccelerator™ (WA): Stops Web browsers from needlessly re-requesting page content from the server. Allows fewer Web servers to handle more users, increasing interactive user performance up to 10 times.

F5 Networks BIG-IP Feature Modules

• Advanced Client Authentication™: Managing authentication individually across applications is costly. The Advanced Client Authentication Module allows for top-level client authentication of HTTP and other traffic types to LDAP, Radius, TACAS, and other centralized authentication devices. This saves money and improves performance by stopping unwanted traffic, reducing managements costs, and decreasing server and application load.
• Advanced Routing™: BIG-IP Advanced Routing Modules allow BIG-IP to manage the routing information used by traffic traversing networks and to share it with other devices. BGP, RIP, and OSPF Modules all enable better interoperability within the corporate network, saving money while improving availability and performance.
• Fast Cache™: The BIG-IP Fast Cache Module prevents servers from having to handle repetitive requests for identical content, cutting server loads by up to 50%. This reduces server costs, speeds end-user performance for frequently requested content, and improves overall server and application performance. The Fast Cache Module targets performance intelligently, on a per-application basis, providing superior flexibility and control.
• Intelligent Compression™: The BIG-IP Intelligent Compression Module dramatically reduces the volume of traffic sent to the user, with up to 15x compression that overcomes poor Web application performance caused by WAN latency and connection bottlenecks. This reduces bandwidth consumption and speeds end-user download times over slower or low-bandwidth connections. The module typically pays for itself in under two months.
• IPv6 Gateway™: Demand for IPv6 is increasing, with many sites facing new requirements to handle IPv6 traffic. The BIG-IP IPv6 Gateway Module gives you a clear and seamless strategy for staging network migration as IPv6 traffic grows. The pooling of mixed IPv4 and IPv6 host resources allows for an easy, cost-effective transition, without wholesale network and application upgrades.
• L7 Rate Shaping™: Contention for shared bandwidth often degrades application performance, and most organizations can't guarantee that high-priority traffic is passed ahead of low-priority traffic. The BIG-IP L7 Rate Shaping Module gives you fine-grained bandwidth control to better manage application bandwidth usage and traffic spikes, controlling traffic spikes and providing priority to traffic classes based on any L4 or L7 parameter.
• Message Security Module™: The BIG-IP Message Security Module is the industry's first reputation-based, perimeter anti-spam solution integrated into the application delivery control network. That means it can extend security for message applications to the edge of the network, stopping up to 70 percent of unwanted e-mail. This keeps illegitimate messages from clogging up bandwidth and frees up capacity on existing anti-spam solutions.
• Protocol Security Module™: BIG-IP Protocol Security Module (PSM) provides powerful security services for HTTP(s), SMTP, and FTP at BIG-IP system speed. PSM is perfect for environments that require more than layer 3 and layer 4 inspection services, where the expertise and management overhead needed to deploy a full-featured web application firewall isn't possible or there is a need to secure other protocols. Protocol enforcement services can be implemented on a per-virtual-server basis and configured within a matter of minutes.
• SSL Acceleration™: The BIG-IP SSL Acceleration Module dramatically improves the performance of servers while providing security, speed, and traffic management during business-critical online transactions. The module frees up servers from the difficult task of encrypting and decrypting data that must be secured for privacy reasons. This CPU-intensive decryption is migrated onto a high-performance device designed to handle SSL transactions more efficiently -- with up to 48,000 SSL transactions per second available on the BIG-IP 8800.

F5 Networks BIG-IP Hardware

• VIPRION: The first application delivery controller that scales on demand. Add up to four performance blades to its chassis and scale your application delivery network as demands grow. With the highest levels of throughput and transactions per second of any platform on the market, this device is the ultimate application delivery controller for next-generation data center design.
• BIG-IP 8800 Series: The BIG-IP 8800 utilizes symmetric multiprocessing across four processor cores. This technology allows BIG-IP performance to scale to four times the level of a single processor system and deliver unmatched levels of Layer 7 and SSL throughput, SSL transactions per second and compression performance on a single application switch.
• BIG-IP 8400 Series: The BIG-IP 8400 provides a flexible platform that can scale to meet next-generation data center design. The Packet Velocity ASIC 10 (PVA 10) delivers industry-leading L4 throughput and DoS protection, allowing the core processor to focus on high-speed SSL and compression performance.
• BIG-IP 6800 Series: With the Packet Velocity ASIC 2 (PVA 2) for fast L4 throughput, redundant power supplies, and optional FIPS and compression hardware, the BIG-IP 6800 can handle more traffic throughput than the BIG-IP 6400.
• BIG-IP 6400 Series: The BIG-IP 6400 provides a flexible platform for emerging application delivery networks, with its Packet Velocity ASIC 2 (PVA 2) for fast L4 throughput, redundant power supplies, and optional FIPS and NEBS certified hardware.
• BIG-IP 3600 Series: The BIG-IP 3600 provides a high-performance, entry-level platform for organizations wanting to add integrated application delivery to their network, with options for advanced security and acceleration.
• BIG-IP 1600 Series: The BIG-IP 1600 offers all the functionality of TMOS in a cost-effective, entry-level platform for intelligent application delivery.
• BIG-IP 4500 Series: The BIG-IP WebAccelerator 4500 is sold exclusively for use with BIG-IP WebAccelerator software. Its dual-processor configuration, 8GB of RAM, and ground-breaking architecture combine to give users secure, reliable application access at high speeds under real-world conditions.