F5 Networks

O2 Networks are the highest qualified F5 partner in Australia with significant demonstrable experience in delivering innovative application optimisation solutions to our telco and enterprise customers.

With application optimisation and control technologies it's F5 first and daylight second.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is a major networking appliances vendor. F5’s flagship product, the BIG-IP network appliance, started out as a network load balancer but today also offers additional functionality such as access control and robust application security.

Add-on modules to F5’s BIG-IP family of products offer email filtering and intelligent compression to allow for lower bandwidth and faster downloads in addition to load balancing and local traffic management capabilities.

F5 offers products in various segments of the Application Delivery Controller market. According to Gartner, F5 has “a continued market-leading position”.

BIG-IP Appliances

Purpose-built BIG-IP hardware platforms deliver power to dramatically improve layer 4–7 traffic throughput and application delivery. Customers can choose from a range of BIG-IP hardware devices to meet specific performance and capacity needs.

The VIPRION hardware extends the BIG-IP platform to an extremely high-performance, bladed device that scales on demand to provide the highest available levels of throughout and transactions per second. For virtual environments, F5 has released virtual appliances for VMware, Xen and Hyper-V that offer the same functionality as the appliance versions in a virtual server footprint.

BIG-IP Product Modules

• Local Traffic Manager (LTM): Local load balancing based on a full-proxy architecture.
• Global Traffic Manager (GTM): Global Server Load Balancing using DNS.
• Link Controller: Inbound and outbound ISP load balancing.
• Application Security Manager (ASM): A Web Application Firewall.
• WebAccelerator: An asymmetric or symmetric advanced caching solution for HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
• Edge Gateway: An SSL VPN.
• WAN Optimisation Module: A data centre symmetric WAN optimization solution.
• Access Policy Manager: Provides access control and authentication for HTTP and HTTPS applications.

The F5 BIG-IP software stack contains features to reduce latency, remove congestion or other network impediments. Application delivery is enhanced by features such as symmetric adaptive compression operates between any two BIG-IP appliances, providing the data reduction, optimization and acceleration found in WAN traffic optimization products.

In addition, F5 centric API and scripting interfaces exist to extend the platform capabilities in demanding environments: 

• iControl Application Programming Interface (API): An open API for management of the BIG-IP
• iRules: A TCL-based scripting language allowing arbitrary manipulation of traffic flowing through the BIG-IP, including real-time modification of said data.

ARX Series

The ARX series is a series of file virtualisation appliances that use technology F5 acquired through its acquisition of Acopia Networks. The devices work as proxies for CIFS and NFS, enabling administrators to control where files physically reside based on policies for age, file type, etc. whilst presenting users with a single target.

Enterprise Manager

The Enterprise Manager appliance optionally provides centralised management of multiple F5 BIG-IP devices.

Case studies using F5 products

Application Optimisation case study.

Cloud Hosting case study.

More information

Visit the F5 Networks website.