F5 to Integrate with VMware Infrastructure to Enhance Customers' Cloud Evironments

Press release:

COMBINED SOLUTION WILL LEVERAGE THE NEW VMWARE READY™ FOR NETWORKING AND SECURITY PROGRAM TO AUTOMATE AND ORCHESTRATE KEY APPLICATION DELIVERY NETWORKING SERVICES

SAN FRANCISCO, August 27, 2012

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced its intent to integrate its BIG-IP^® products using the new VMware Ready^™ for Networking and Security Program. A jointly developed solution will help organizations seamlessly integrate services and efficiently support software defined data centers. Through the new VMware program and tight integration between F5 and VMware, customers will be able to continue utilizing their existing investments in networking and security products while realizing the efficiency and agility benefits of VMware cloud infrastructure with a validated joint solution.

Today’s announcement coincides with the VMworld 2012 conference, taking place August 26–30 in San Francisco. Today at 2:30 p.m. PT at the event, F5 will host a technical session demonstrating the jointly developed solution. The session is entitled “Solving the Application Provisioning Nightmare: Integrating vSphere and vCloud Director with your Application Delivery Networking Services.”

“F5’s approach to managing application delivery in the enterprise extends well beyond its own management solutions,” said Jim Ritchings, VP of Business Development at F5. “Through dedicated integration efforts, F5 technologies can augment the capabilities of VMware vSphere^® and VMwarevCloud^® Director, enabling IT professionals to efficiently deploy and optimize application delivery services across virtualized and cloud environments.”

DETAILS

As organizations pursue increasingly agile IT deployment models, VMware and F5 seek to provide technologies that make software defined data centers a reality. A key element of this vision is the ability to seamlessly integrate application services into data center operations, while simultaneously reducing management complexity and operations costs. To enable integration with other leading vendors, VMware has developed the VMware Ready for Networking and Security Program. As a launch partner, F5 is collaborating with VMware to enable the integration of F5’s suite of Application Delivery Controller (ADC) services with VMware vCloud^® and vSphere^® infrastructure solutions. This integration will take advantage of all the services available with the F5^® BIG-IP product family, including load balancing, SSL offloading, web acceleration, web application firewall, and more. The combined solution will give customers a more powerful way to provision, manage, and orchestrate application delivery services alongside virtualized application workloads throughout their IT infrastructures.

F5 BIG-IP solutions can implement application-specific policies to govern application security, performance, and availability. A joint solution is equally valuable to cloud environments using vCloud Director, as well as non-cloud virtual environments built on vSphere. It can also be implemented with vSphere using either physical BIG-IP devices or BIG-IP virtual editions. The solution also leverages BIG-IP iApps^™, a feature that simplifies the configuration of ADC service policies, to ensure simple and rapid deployment for optimized services in the VMware Ready model.

In deploying VMware and F5 solutions together, customers can:

•  Automate Processes for Simplified Application Provisioning

A combined solution enables IT to reach new levels of operational efficiency by significantly reducing the need to perform repetitive tasks, which also minimizes the opportunity for errors due to manual intervention. It creates a model where IT can produce pre-approved ADC service policies and application owners can self-service those policies for their applications. In this way, organizations can greatly reduce the amount of man hours necessary to deploy and support ADC services for new or expanded applications. This enables much quicker IT responsiveness, greater IT agility, and lower operating costs.

• Uphold Compliance and Security Mandates

With F5 solutions, IT teams can direct and control how application traffic is handled by pre-configuring policies based on security requirements, business goals, and other priorities. This approach enables better enforcement of industry regulations and corporate policies, even as applications and user access variables change over time.

• Efficiently Deploy and Scale IT Resources

F5 and VMware enable organizations to seamlessly connect cloud resources to existing on-premises data centers to scale application services and support additional capacity as needed. In configuring data center operations, IT can provide improved application response time for users and monitor capacity utilization to efficiently adjust to fluctuating resource demands. By effortlessly scaling resources across the entire infrastructure, organizations can avoid paying for unneeded resources, freeing up IT funds for other important initiatives.

SUPPORTING QUOTES

“Collaboration with F5 on the new VMware Ready^™ program is a natural extension of the companies’ ongoing technology partnership,” said Parag Patel, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances at VMware. “F5 provides powerful application services that our customers can use to optimally build, deliver, and monitor their applications. This future integration will ensure that customers can leverage the full complement of F5’s services for their applications. Using VMware and F5 solutions together helps organizations simplify and automate service provisioning so that systems can be easily maintained in a rapid, repeatable, and consistent manner.”

“Getting the performance you want from your applications in a virtualized environment often comes with the tradeoff of added complexity,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “Technology partnerships like the one between F5 and VMware help customers overcome these complexities, and help organizations manage applications in a virtual environment within a simple, efficient, and secure framework.”

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, go to www.f5.com.

You can also follow @f5networks on Twitter or visit us on Facebook for more information about F5, its partners, and technology. For a complete listing of F5 community sites, please visitwww.f5.com/news-press-events/web-media/community.html.

F5, BIG-IP, and iApps are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. VMware, VMware vCloud, VMware Ready, and vSphere are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

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