Combat Networks – Certified Canadian F5 Partner

Combat Networks is pleased to announce our most recent partnership with F5! (http://f5.com).

Combat’s mission has to always be focused at providing the best service and support on market leading communications based technolgy to our customers.  With Nortel’s recent sell of of it’s Alteon platform (news release) to Radware, Combat was faced with two options

1. Move foward with the aquition by Radware and become a Radware partner, or
2. Begin an internal evaluation for a new Load Balancing/Application Delivery manufacturer.

As part of our service offering and value to our clients – ensuring best of breed.  We choose option 2. and started and Engineering bake off here at Combat.

Combat Engineers began the process of reviewing industry architectures, and decided to outline a series of performance metrics and features as part of their decision in weighing the options to indentify the new platform:

• move towards Application Delivery methodology
• Provide Security as part of offering
• SSL Off-Loading
• Load Balancing
• Application Acceleration
• Application Security

Coupled with these features, a  list of Customer Business intiatives and trends were required as part of the evaluation as well:

• Application Deployment and Delivery
• Business Continuity
• User Experiance/Application Performance
• Universal Access and Security Enforcement
• Consolidation
• Storage Tiering
• Data Migration

The Combat team isolated F5 as a market leader within the realm of providing key Application Delivery services such as:

• SSL offloading – ensuring faster server response times
• Load balancing across multi-platform, location, virtual/no-virtual devices
• Applcation Accerleration
• Application Sercurity
• Connections Management
• URL rewrite
• Compression
• Object Caching
• Trasaction assurance
• Trafic Shaping
• Network Protocol manipulation

What we found most impressive is that these services and features come already shipped with the device and are enabled by licence procurment, as well provide a 30 day free trial.  The features above are deployed across the following core modules:

1. BIG-IP Global Traffic manager
2. BIG-IP Link Controller
3. Firepass//BIG-IP Access Policy Manager
4. BIG-IP Traffice Manager//Web Accelerator
5. Application Security Manager ARX

These modules are provided across the  F5 TMOS ^® universal, shared product platform that adds intelligence and complete control to application delivery.  As well, F5 has DevCentral, a business-driven social networking site where a community of more than 35,000 users share innovations in creating scalable, dynamic networks.

While Combat did do our homework; industry specifics/researchers such as Gartner Research have provided results on F5 architectures, here are two interesting articles for further reading:

Load Balancers are Dead: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/f5networks/164098.html

Gartner Research 2009: http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/f5networks/vol6/article1/article1.html

We are very pleased at becomming an F5 Partner for more information please contact your sales representative, engineer or sales@combatnetworks.com

Thanks

- Combat

Tagged as: application performance, F5, load balancing, Partner, Technology