Infosec 2010: F5 supports firms' rush to the cloud

F5 said that its new products will help enterprises take full advantage of the cloud

F5 Networks has announced the launch of its Big-IP 10.2 software designed to help customers extend their enterprise infrastructure to the cloud to run systems in a more holistic and dynamic manner.

The firm claimed that the new product would enable dynamic systems to intelligently route users to information either in-house or in the cloud, and improve application delivery.

Owen Cole, F5's technical director, said that this would allow users to get more scalability and flexibility from the cloud by merging technologies for security, optimisation, data management and application delivery into a single system.

"Many firms are looking at the cloud, but are unsure of its potential. With our new offering they can now get the same infrastructure controls that virtualisation offers in their enterprise systems, but in a cloud-based environment," he said.

"The update to 10.2 has been designed to help firms do more as well by giving them control and security for the acceleration and optimisation of applications hosted in the cloud, as if they were part of their internal architectures."

Cole cited the example of an HR department hosting more users towards the end of the month, and an online retailer seeing a surge in traffic around December. He said that using the new Big-IP 10.2 system allows servers to intelligently react to these demands as necessary.

"The context-aware system knows who a user is and what they need to do, and can make better use of servers on internal and cloud-based databases. It can spill users over to the cloud depending on what they are doing, if it's not mission critical," he explained.

F5 also announced a series of application delivery controller platforms in its Big-IP range, including the 11050 platform that can host 42Gbit/s and the 8950 that can host 20Gbit/s, to offer higher throughput and enhanced layer performance.

Both controllers support 10Gbit Ethernet connectivity that the firm said would help deliver enhanced application services, and give users the ability to bring in additional application services such as acceleration, availability and application security.