F5 Networks, Inc. announced enhanced software and hardware offerings across its product portfolio to extend its dominant lead in the market. F5 delivers unprecedented performance and flexibility for most complex and demanding infrastructures, including cloud environments. F5's physical and virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) offerings help organizations easily orchestrate, accelerate, and secure the delivery of business-critical applications and network services while driving down costs, as required by agile, adaptive cloud networks.

F5's new platform-based systems are designed around the company's unique, field-proven intelligent services framework, which gives customers a set of programmable, extensible services for on-demand scalability. F5 extends its technology leadership with: Unrivaled ADC Processing Power for Enterprises and Service Providers: the new VIPRION(R) 4800 chassis is built to handle performance levels previously unseen in the industry, applying intelligent services at rates exceeding 20 million layer 7 requests per second and 160 Gbps of SSL bulk throughput (over 4x the nearest competitive offering). With these levels of performance, organizations can effortlessly scale application delivery services within the most demanding clouds and data centers; Enhanced BIG-IP(R) Virtual Editions with Broad Hypervisor Support: F5's virtual ADCs now provide up to 3 Gbps of throughput and support a full range of hypervisors and virtualized environments, including Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud Suite, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and KVM/Linux.

This gives customers limitless flexibility in leveraging cloud and virtualization technologies to efficiently support their business; Leading ADC Performance at the Entry Level and Above: F5 provides the highest performing entry-level appliances to enable customers to "start light and grow right" with the best price/performance value available for ADCs. F5 is adding the following products to its BIG-IP hardware lineup: BIG-IP 2000 series, offering advanced functionality and setting the standard as the first entry-level ADC with 10 GbE interfaces; BIG-IP 4000s platform, with the 4000 series handling up to 850,000 L7 requests per second for best-in-class performance; BIG-IP 10200v platform, with vCMP(R) capabilities, 40 GbE interfaces, and leading high-end performance. Although point products may solve specific network requirements, a piecemeal approach to networking increases overall costs, introduces complexity, and imposes unnecessary limitations on scale and capacity.

In recent years, the widespread adoption of F5's ADCs has been driven by the company's ability to address customers' current demands and future business needs in parallel. Designed to provide an intelligent services framework, VIPRION and BIG-IP products enable organizations to efficiently consolidate multiple core network and security functions such as application acceleration, global load balancing, web application firewall, application delivery firewall, and other advanced capabilities. Additionally, F5 technologies like iRules(R) and iApps(R) enable teams to fine-tune and auto-instantiate custom layer 4-7 services.

F5's new ADC offerings provide: Dynamic Use of IT Resources with F5's Innovative ScaleN Technology: F5's ScaleN(TM) serves as an important element of the company's unified platform approach. ScaleN is the industry's only technology that allows an ADC system to scale dramatically, even with core acceleration and security functionality enabled. All other competing products suffer incremental processing penalties when supporting additional features or running multiple services at once; ScaleN intelligently allocates resources through multi-tenant virtualization and the ability to scale systems up, down, in, and out with complete device flexibility and resilience.

This enables organizations to simplify their IT infrastructures, make existing technology investments more efficient, and better support dynamic resource models and cloud initiatives--all while delivering maximum availability and uptime for crucial applications. The F5 ADC products introduced are all ScaleN-enabled; Deployment Options to Support Physical, Virtual, and Cloud Environments. Traditional practices have called for organizations to build physical data centers using a collection of hardware devices.

However, today's customers are choosing to deploy physical and virtual solutions alongside public and private clouds to dynamically support fluctuating resource needs, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. F5's offerings enable organizations to select solutions that fit their business priorities and technology requirements, without sacrificing the performance and control that can be essential to their operations. F5's new products push the boundaries of what the industry can expect from an ADC, raising the standard for other vendors.

In addition, F5 has also increased the capabilities of its virtual ADCs, making it easier for customers to combine F5's application delivery technologies with leading cloud providers like Amazon Web Services.