Press release:

CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Northwestern University Delivers Better Insight to Students, Faculty Using BMC Software

Secure, real-time visibility of IT enables superior web application performance capabilities

CHICAGO, Sept. 6, 2012–With more than 25,000 students, faculty and staff, Northwestern University prides itself on its ability to combine innovative teaching and research in a highly collaborative environment. Web applications are critical to that collaboration, representing a “backbone” for the university’s work.

The university’s IT department needed a much stronger view into the performance, health and availability of its web applications. Northwestern turned to BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to improve its dynamic learning and teaching capabilities.Prior to choosing BMC, the university had limited visibility into its application performance, which meant diagnosing and resolving any problem was lengthy and inefficient.

“With BMC Software, we have an accurate way to measure usage, performance and availability,” said Dana Nielsen, director of monitoring and management systems at Northwestern University Information Technology. “As a result, we can make better resource decisions and that means better support for our students, faculty and staff.”

Nielsen added, “Instead of relying on anecdotal information, we have a baseline for an intelligent conversation about performance. Having a true measurement of what’s happened has increased our credibility. We can show that our systems are up 99 percent of the time. All of that has been tremendously helpful.”

The Challenge

Northwestern University did not have a single, secure dashboard to monitor its web applications and adequately determine performance issues. As a result, the lack of visibility to critical data caused the processes for troubleshooting and resolving problems to be inefficient.

The Solution

The university created a capacity and availability service monitoring dashboard with the BMC End User Experience Management solution. This provided IT staff with real-time web application performance data. Additionally, students, faculty and staff could check the performance, health and availability of their web applications.

Benefits

The university has experienced several benefits, including:

• Access to real-time data, which accelerated problem resolution and improved the user experience
• Better reporting capabilities to facilitate rapid problem resolution
• Accurate measurement and tracking to demonstrate quality of services, enabling better decision making
• Freed up technology resources and improved collaboration on issues

For more information on the university’s implementation and the BMC End User Experience Management solution, please visit:

• Read the full Northwestern University case study
• BMC End User Experience Management
• Follow @bmcsoftware on Twitter
• Become a fan of BMC on Facebook

Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software.

Business runs better when IT runs at its best. That's why more than 20,000 IT organizations – from the Global 100 to the smallest businesses – in over 120 countries rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. With the leading Business Service Management platform, Cloud Management, and the industry’s broadest choice of IT management solutions, BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

A Word from Our Sponsor

Oracle Press Release

Leading Technology Vendors Announce New Specification Designed to Ease Management of Applications Across Public and Private Clouds

First Platform-as-a-Service Management API Specification to be Submitted to OASIS to Develop Industry Standard

Redwood Shores, Calif. – August 30, 2012

News Facts

Leading technology vendors, including CloudBees, Cloudsoft Corporation, Huawei, Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat, and Software AG, today announced Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP), a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) management Application Programming Interface (API) specification.

Designed for managing both public and private cloud applications, including packaging and deployment of the applications, CAMP will be submitted to Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for development of an industry standard, in an effort to help ensure interoperability for deploying and managing applications across cloud environments.

As the first effort to standardize a PaaS management interface, CAMP is intended to provide a common basis for developing multi-cloud management tools as well as offering cloud providers and consumers a REST-based approach to application management.

CAMP provides a common development vocabulary and API that can work across multiple clouds without excessive adaptation and is compatible with PaaS-aware and PaaS-unaware application development environments, both offline and in the cloud.

Common use cases for CAMP include moving an on-premise application to the cloud (private or public) as well as redeployment of such applications across cloud platforms from multiple vendors. CAMP reduces the effort to move applications between clouds and provides service assurance through interoperability.

Supporting Quotes

“Even though the PaaS marketplace is in its infancy, and vendors like CloudBees are driving innovation incredibly rapidly, customers are already concerned about lock-in and demanding interoperability. CAMP is an important first step toward that important goal,” said Steven Harris, senior vice president of products, CloudBees Inc.

“Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are emerging as the norm for the enterprise with PaaS trending rapidly as the natural entry point. CAMP will accelerate this trend as cloud-agnostic application management is key to cloud interoperability at this level,” said Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO, Cloudsoft Corporation.

“Oracle’s commitment to driving industry standards that are crucial to our customers’ cloud environments, and to adopting these standards in Oracle products, is demonstrated by our CAMP collaboration. CAMP defines a simple API that enables customers to have an interoperable solution across multiple vendors’ offerings, manage application lifecycles easily, and move applications between clouds," said Don Deutsch, vice president, Chief Standards Officer, Oracle.

"Rackspace wants clouds to be open to give customers freedom and choice. CAMP offers a way to enable application portability between public and private clouds, and even between cloud service providers offering similar Platform-as-a-Service solutions," said Adrian Otto, senior technology strategist, Rackspace.

"Red Hat has long believed in collaboration with the industry and open source community to drive the delivery of compelling technology to meet the needs of developers and enterprises around the world, and our participation in CAMP is another proof point," said Mark Little, senior director of Engineering, Middleware at Red Hat. "Platform-as-a-Service offerings like Red Hat's OpenShift offer developers an easy on-ramp to developing applications. A specification like CAMP represents a considerable step towards lowering the barrier of entry new developers perceive when it comes to migrate their workloads to PaaS."

Software AG is at the forefront of leading industry standards, recognizing the need for interoperable and portable solutions for our customers. Thus far, cloud standards have been limited to the infrastructure (IaaS) space. As an interoperable standard for management of applications on hosted platforms (PaaS), the CAMP specification takes it to the next level in the cloud space. We are pleased to have collaborated in this work and look forward to the CAMP specification in an OASIS TC in the future," said Hans-Christoph Rohland, Senior Vice President - Research & Development, Software AG.

Supporting Resources

CAMP website

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center.  For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com

Accenture to Acquire NewsPage, a Leading Provider of Integrated Distributor Management and Mobility Software for the Consumer Goods Industry

Press release from Accenture:

August 30, 2012

Accenture to Acquire NewsPage, a Leading Provider of Integrated Distributor Management and Mobility Software for the Consumer Goods Industry

 

NEW YORK; Aug. 30, 2012 – Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has entered into an agreement to acquire Singapore-based NewsPage Pte Ltd (“NewsPage”), a leading provider of integrated distributor management and mobility software for the consumer goods industry in emerging markets.

 

NewsPage provides software products to some of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Upon closing, the acquisition will complement the capabilities of the Accenture CAS software platform, a leading integrated software platform that supports the consumer goods industry sales processes, and help strengthen its capabilities in emerging markets. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

 

The Accenture CAS software platform helps consumer goods companies achieve greater trade efficiency and sales by enabling improved product availability on the shelf and increasing their ability to efficiently collaborate with retailers, while supporting the management of large, mobile sales and distribution forces.

 

Upon closing, the acquisition of NewsPage will add distributor management and mobility capabilities to the Accenture CAS software platform through a lean, user-friendly application. Also, NewsPage will bring a multi-platform mobility capability to the Accenture CAS solution, allowing it to run on Windows, Android and iOS devices. NewsPage’s products are delivered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis or on-location.

 

The combination of the Accenture CAS software platform and NewsPage’s products will offer consumer goods companies the ability to manage all of their sales processes on a single global sales platform – from trade promotion management and optimization to retail execution, and from distributor management to direct store delivery, merchandising and customer service.

 

“This acquisition is important as it will enhance Accenture’s ability to help global consumer goods companies by supporting all route-to-market sales and delivery models across mature and emerging markets,” said Fabio Vacirca, senior managing director of Accenture’s Consumer Goods & Services practice. “NewsPage has a strong client base of global consumer goods brands that have benefited from its products. Its addition will strengthen Accenture’s software capabilities in emerging markets and reinforce Accenture’s position as a leading provider of integrated sales software for the consumer goods industry.”

 

Once the transaction has closed, approximately 128 NewsPage employees will join Accenture, and will continue to focus on product development, client sales and delivery. This team will be integrated into the Accenture Software organization.

 

“We are pleased that Accenture has recognized the strength of the NewsPage products, and the valuable work that we deliver for our clients,” said Tim Yoon, CEO of NewsPage. “We believe that the combination of our two organizations will create a compelling offer for consumer goods companies in emerging markets. Now we will be able to meet our client’s software implementation needs in countries outside of our traditional geographic area, benefiting from Accenture’s global reach and experience. This will be particularly useful where clients want business process changes before they implement the software platform.”

 

The acquisition is subject to closing requirements and is expected to close within 60 days.

 

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 249,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

 

Accenture Software combines deep technology acumen with industry knowledge to develop differentiated software products. It offers innovative software-based solutions to enable organizations to meet their business goals and achieve high performance. It's home page is:www.accenture.com/software. For more information on Accenture CAS, please visitwww.accenture.com/accenturecas.

 

About NewsPage
NewsPage, a market leader in mobility, has been in the business of developing and deploying industry-ready mobile applications since 1993. NewsPage Distributor Management is an end-to-end enterprise solution that caters for businesses that sell thru distributors. NewsPage has an extensive install base worldwide with more than 60 successful systems running in 20 countries across 7 different time zones in multiple languages. For more information, visitwww.newspage.com.sg.
 

# # #

EMC VFCache First to Deduplicate Server Flash Cache

EMC Press Release

EMC VFCache First to Deduplicate Server Flash Cache

Drives New Levels of Efficiency with Deduplication; Interoperable with VMware vSphere vMotion; Builds Foundation for Integration with EMC VMAX

VMworld – San Francisco, CA - August 28, 2012

News Summary:

• EMC VFCache™ solution delivers in-line deduplication of cached data—an industry first.
• EMC VFCache is now interoperable with VMware™ vSphere® vMotion® technology.
• EMC VFCache delivers new capabilities that form the foundation for integration with the EMC® VMAX® Family.
• Significant VFCache hardware and software updates improve performance and capacity, including support for Cisco UCS Blade Servers.

Follow EMC at VMworld:

• EMC Community Network: To view everything EMC at VMworld, visithttps://community.emc.com/go/vmworld
• Twitter: For continuous news and event updates for EMC at VMworld, follow EMC on Twitter at@CloudEMC and @EMCCorp and join the conversations using #EMC and #VMworld
• Facebook: To view highlight videos, interviews and more, like EMC on Facebook
• Flickr: View photos of EMC at VMworld on Flickr and tag your VMworld photos with "EMC and VMworld"

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today at VMworld® 2012 set a new benchmark for enterprise Flash efficiency by delivering in-line cache deduplication on EMC® VFCache™, a server Flash caching solution that turbo-charges performance in mission-critical Oracle, Microsoft and SAP application environments—up to 3X in some cases. EMC also extended its leadership in VMware environments, with new interoperability between VFCache and VMware® vSphere® vMotion to enable seamless and flexible movement of virtual machines in environments accelerated by VFCache. EMC continues to invest in the industry's most comprehensive Flash portfolio, delivering all the performance benefits of Flash without sacrificing the benefits of network storage—high availability, disaster recovery, data integrity, and reliability. This unique approach is why EMC shipped a record amount of Flash capacity in the second quarter of 2012.

Technology Highlights:

• More Efficient: EMC is leveraging its leadership in deduplication for backup environments and applying that expertise to caching. With the addition of in-line deduplication of cached data for a larger effective cache, the cache size of VFCache is significantly increased in environments with applications leveraging high deduplication gains. This capability delivers better cost per gigabyte and extends the life expectancy of the card.
• Deeper Integration: VFCache is now more deeply integrated at the virtual, storage and server levels to maximize mission-critical application environments. VFCache now delivers:
  • Automation of VMware vSphere vMotion environments for efficient administration. VFCache interoperability with vSphere vMotion makes it faster and easier to achieve continuous up-time and fluid operations, complete environment maintenance, and enable seamless migrations—helping customers accelerate their journey to the cloud. Through the EMC VSI plug-in for VMware vCenter™, EMC enables VMware administrators to handle other priority tasks, and ensures business continuity with no system downtime when migrating operations.
  • Simplified management, more streamlined operations, and greater visibility into operational information. EMC VFCache contains the foundational capabilities to provide EMC VMAX storage administrators with more operational information, such as VFCache's relationships to specific LUNS, more performance statistics, and error condition reporting. These capabilities will support superior storage management relative to other solutions in the industry, and represent another key step toward EMC's vision of high performance automated tiered storage. Customers continue to benefit from VFCache's turbocharged performance with the protection for which EMC storage is trusted around the world. EMC is also committed to integrating VFCache with the rest of EMC's storage portfolio—including EMC VNX™—in 2013.
  • Support for Cisco's upcoming offering of LSI's customized PCIe Flash mezzanine cards for UCS B-Series Blade Servers (announced in May 2012).
• Better Performance: The latest version of VFCache supports multiple PCIe cards per server and delivers more capacity options—with support for new 700GB PCIe cards—to cache larger working sets and offer greater performance to customers. In addition, EMC continues to optimize and advance the performance of demanding enterprise workloads by lowering latency through tuning of the VFCache caching algorithms.

In addition to VFCache, customers with mixed workloads can choose from EMC's hybrid arrays armed with EMC FAST™ (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technology that automates the movement of "hot" data onto Flash drives and moves "cold" data to high-capacity drives. For VDI or test and development environments with 100% "hot" data, customers will be able to leverage all-Flash arrays that will deliver the raw performance required with innovative new technologies from "Project X" through EMC's acquisition of XtremIO (announced in May 2012). For persistent data stores with performance intensive workloads—including high-frequency trading or online gaming—EMC will offer "Project Thunder", a server network attached appliance built entirely of high-speed PCIe Flash (announced in February 2012).

Availability

Deduplication and other new VFCache enhancements are available today through EMC and its channel partners.

Customer Quotes:

Henrik Sørensen, SAP Operations Manager at L'Oréal Danmark SNS

"L'Oréal has made cosmetics for a century—and we are the worldwide cosmetic leader. We manage 27 global brands that are distributed throughout 130 countries. Information is gold to us—and drives our ability to innovate. The benefits of Flash technology are a key piece of L'Oréal SNS IT strategy. We use VFCache to boost the performance of our SAP application environment. With a powerful capability like deduplication—support for higher capacity drives—and VMware affinity, EMC is delivering L'Oréal SNS with an even better, faster and simpler way to achieve peak performance results for our mission-critical applications."

Scott Heffner, Network Operations Manager, Wentworth-Douglass Hospital

"Wentworth-Douglass Hospital has evolved and grown since its doors opened in 1906. We are now one of the largest acute care hospitals in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and Southern Maine. Data is central to delivering the best care possible to patients, which is why we rely on EMC technologies—including VMAX 10K, EMC RecoverPoint™, Avamar®, and Data Domain® solutions—in a VMware virtualized environment. With new VFCache support for Cisco UCS blade servers, we will use VFCache in our virtual EMC VMAX environment to achieve the performance required of our demanding IT needs. One thing hasn't changed since 1906, and that is that the patient is still the center of our timeless tradition of providing compassionate and comprehensive care—EMC technologies help enable us to deliver exactly that."

Industry Analyst Quote:

Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director, Solid State Drives and Hard Drive Components, IDC

"IDC expects that annual Flash capacity shipped in the enterprise will grow by 20X by 2016 thanks to the ever-growing number of applications, the digitization of data, cloud and Big Data. Storage I/O is a critical performance bottleneck for many data intensive applications. Flash is the essential ingredient in the industry's race for application speed. With these latest updates to EMC VFCache, EMC is delivering efficiency that didn't previously exist for the customer. This addition to its comprehensive Flash portfolio is an important evolution."

Partner Quotes:

Eric Kaplan,VP Engineering at Ahead

"Ahead enables companies to take advantage of key technologies driving the next-generation data center. As our clients' trusted technology advisor, we partner with EMC to provide best-of-breed products and services to our customers, providing the support and direction they need to make IT a competitive advantage for their business. EMC VFCache helps our customers' applications reach the performance they need while delivering the data protection their business demands. With added capabilities for deduplication and user-initiated VMware vMotion, VFCache delivers new levels of efficiencies to our customers."

Steve Gillaspy, Sr. Director Product Management Unified Computing Systems, Cisco

"Flash storage has proven to be a very disruptive and opportunistic technology to drive application performance. We are working with EMC and other partners to continue to deliver solutions that help to enable our customers to run their mission-critical applications faster. With EMC VFCache and Cisco UCS Blade Servers, customers are finding a simpler way to drive efficiency and productivity in the data center."

Gary Green, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware

"VFCache interoperability with VMware vMotion is about simplicity and automation for our customers. We're committed to delivering customers flexibility, efficiency and choice. As virtual environments continue to grow—and become more complex—it is interoperability like VFCache and vMotion, as well as continued innovation in PCIe Flash, that will address what customers need to handle the IT transformation occurring in the market today."

EMC Quote:

Mark Sorenson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Flash Business Unit, EMC

"Since 2008 EMC has led the market in enterprise Flash innovation—setting in motion the industry's move to Flash enabled storage arrays. EMC is uniquely positioned to help customers take advantage of Flash technology, and we continue to invest and innovate to offer purpose-built solutions for specific use cases and deployment options. Our approach is 'no-compromise'—offering hybrid Flash enabled storage arrays, Flash in the server, and Flash via the network. With the addition of deduplication, VMware interoperability, and performance enhancements to VFCache, we're yet again setting the pace for the industry—and delivering customers—the most optimized and efficient offering."

Additional Resources:

• Read the Demartek evaluation report
• Read the VFCache data sheet
• Read about VFCache in virtualized Oracle environments
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

Brocade ADX Series to Unveil VXLAN Gateway and Application Delivery Services

Press release:

Brocade ADX Series to Unveil VXLAN Gateway and Application Delivery Services

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on diggShare on stumbleuponShare on newsvineShare on redditShare on emailShare on print

Brocade Advances Software-Defined Networking and Enables Scalable Virtual Networking Services

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Aug 27, 2012) - VMworld -- Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced significant progress in its software-defined networking (SDN) vision, strategy and innovation roadmap by unveiling the Brocade^® ADX^®Series application delivery switches, capable of delivering highly scalable VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network) gateway services for virtualized cloud networks developed in partnership with VMware.

Using the Brocade ADX VXLAN gateway solution, Brocade and VMware customers can virtualize their networks at enterprise and service provider scale, and with hardware-based performance, using VXLAN. Customers can use the Brocade ADX switches to connect VXLAN environments to the traditional Internet as well as run applications that span VXLAN and existing non-VXLAN networks. This enables organizations to use their current infrastructure while leveraging the benefits of VXLAN to support multitenancy and large-scale deployment of applications and virtual machines (VMs).

Network virtualization is a core element of Brocade's SDN vision, and VXLAN enables cloud service providers to build virtual networks on top of their existing infrastructure. VXLAN is a network virtualization technology that addresses the emerging challenges in the cloud data center. VXLAN enables multitenancy, scale for large numbers of applications and flexible provisioning with minimal interruption of infrastructure services. By leveraging Ethernet technology, VXLAN enables large numbers of virtual domains to be created above existing networks.

The Brocade ADX switch VXLAN gateway offers benefits such as:

• Efficient network and compute utilization while retaining access to traditionally connected resources;
• Scalable and secure multitenant network virtualization across large Layer 3 networking domains;
• More flexible VM placement and mobility, reducing operational and management complexities and cost;
• Delivery of load balancing services across both physical and virtual resources, combining physical servers and VXLAN-connected virtual machines at any location in the data center.

Brocade will demonstrate this VXLAN gateway capability in the Brocade booth (#901) at VMWorld® 2012 this week.

"As a leader in data center networking innovation, Brocade recognizes the need to bridge emerging technologies such as VXLAN with existing data center investments. By working closely with VMware, and leveraging the Brocade ADX application delivery switch, we are excited to be demonstrating VXLAN gateway functionality. This innovation will be essential to enabling real-world deployments of VXLAN and other overlay networking technologies," said Jason Nolet, vice president of data center networking, Brocade.

"Networking is a key resource of today's software-defined data center and its integration and alignment with other virtualized services is important. We are pleased Brocade is demonstrating the Brocade VXLAN gateway, which will enable customers to use VXLAN's scalability with applications and databases running in non-VXLAN networks," said Allwyn Sequeira, CTO & vice president, Networking and Security, VMware.

Brocade networking capabilities are integrated with VMware vCenter™ Server today via Brocade Network Advisor, giving vCenter users clear management visibility to Brocade storage network products. In addition, the Brocade ADX switch and Brocade Application Resource Broker integrate with VMware vCenter Server to elastically scale up and down workload resources in response to real-time end-user application experience.

Brocade at VMworld 2012Brocade is a leading network provider whose solutions are utilized by the world's leading enterprises and service providers. Brocade is a trusted data center partner in 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 data centers due to the company's focus on helping customers optimize their use of their existing data center infrastructure while providing a smooth transition to the cloud.

Brocade sessions at VMworld 2012 will focus on the latest requirements and options for building an optimized data center for cloud computing.

• Demonstrations at the booth (#901)
  • Cloud-optimized networking with Brocade and VXLAN
  • Large-scale virtual end-user computing across data centers
  • Disaster avoidance for critical applications

Spotlight Session:

• Building the Next-Generation Data Center for the Cloud
  • Date: Wednesday, August 29
  • Time: 2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
  • Location: Moscone South, Lower Level: Gateway 104

This session will focus on how to combine best practices with new options for building next-generation data centers, including Ethernet fabrics, network virtualization with VXLAN and other innovations in software-defined networking. #BRCDVMworld

Breakout Sessions:

• Deploying Large-Scale Virtual End-User Computing Across Data Centers
  • Date: Monday, August 27
  • Time: 12:30-1:30 p.m.
  • Location: Moscone South, Level 3, Room 307

This session examines a proven reference architecture consisting of EUC/VDI deployment across multiple data centers with end-to-end network flow monitoring and VMware SRM to provide business continuity. #BRCDVMworld

• Disaster Avoidance for SAP-Critical Applications
  • Date: Wednesday, August 29
  • Time: 9:30-10:10 a.m.
  • Moscone West, Level 2, Room 2002

This session will describe a solution that increases the availability of SAP applications by eliminating single points of failure at all layers in the environment. #BRCDVMworld

Sessions will be led by Brocade speakers Chip Copper, Ph.D. Global Solutions Architect, and Jonathan Hudson, Global Solutions Architect.

San Francisco Moscone Convention Center, Booth #901 and selected room locations as indicated for speaker sessions.

• Register here: www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us
  
• Follow the conversation at #BRCDVMworld and #VMworld.

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.

###

Press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

F5 Highlights Integrated Virtualization and Cloud Solutions at VMworld^® 2012

F5 showcases enterprise application delivery that optimizes virtual desktop infrastructures and other VMware technologies

Seattle, August 21, 2012

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced its activities at VMworld^® 2012, taking place August 26–30 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. As a Platinum sponsor, F5 will offer dedicated technical sessions that highlight ways enterprise IT professionals can improve the agility of their systems. Specifically, F5 will demonstrate how its BIG-IP^® solutions enhance the value of VMware View^® environments and improve organizations’ operational efficiency by streamlining service provisioning and orchestration in the cloud withVMware vCloud^®.

Visit F5 at Booth #1101: “Connect. Secure. Orchestrate.”

Given that one of IT’s biggest challenges today is the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend, F5 will feature a mobile device bar where visitors can see how BIG-IP solutions improve access management by augmenting the scalability, security, and availability of VMware View environments. F5 will demonstrate two specific new solutions that help optimize end-user computing with VMware View virtual desktop clients:

• The F5 Single Namespace solution, which uses F5^® BIG-IP products and iRules^®—a key differentiator for F5 that helps customize how network resources are directed—to simplify users’ access to VMware View at different times from different locations. This is especially beneficial to VMware View deployments with multiple pods or sites by providing users with simplified access and an improved user experience.

• The F5 Username Persistence solution, which uses F5’s BIG-IP products and an innovative iRule to maintain user connections irrespective of device or location. This enables a user to change devices or locations and reconnect to an existing desktop session, resulting in a better user experience.

F5 also provided technical input and support for three VMware View solutions: (1) the VMware View Business Process Desktop; (2) the VMware View Mobile Secure Desktop; and (3) the VMware View AlwaysOn Desktop. F5’s engagement with VMware on these solutions reflects both companies’ commitment to making IT professionals and users as efficient as possible.

Technical Sessions: “Integrating Application Delivery Services with VMware Solutions”

In concert with VMware, F5 will host three technical sessions that explain how organizations can leverage F5’s industry-leading Application Delivery Networking solutions in VMware cloud and virtual desktop environments to maximize application performance, availability, security, and manageability. Each session will feature a co-presenter from VMware. Individual session titles are listed below, along with corresponding links to additional information such as times, dates, and speaker names:

• Solving the Application Provisioning Nightmare: Integrating vSphere and vCloud Director with Your Application Delivery Networking Services
• Enhancing the User Experience for Multi-Pod VMware View Deployments
• Application Heal Thyself! How to Automate the Most Important Networking Functions for Your Applications

In addition, VMware will lead separate sessions, which will include F5’s solutions in the larger context of software defined data center initiatives. Session titles are listed below with links to additional information:

• vCloud Networking: An Extensible and Open Platform
• Software Defined Networking and Security: The Here and Now
• VMware vCloud Automated Networking Framework: Network Extensibility (NetX)
  

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 visit www.f5.com/news-press-events/web-media/community.html.

F5, BIG-IP, and iRules 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, VMworld and VMware View 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.

# # #