F5 Networks

F5 Networks, Inc.
Public
Traded as NASDAQ: FFIV
S&P 500 Component
Industry Technology
Predecessor F5 Labs
Founded February 26, 1996 (1996-02-26)
Headquarters Seattle, Washington, United States
Key people
 John McAdam (President and CEO)
Products Networking
Revenue
  • Increase US$ 1,481.314 million (2013) [1]
  • Increase US$ 1,377.247 million (2012) [1]
  • Increase US$ 430.818 million (2013) [1]
  • Increase US$ 426.303 million (2012) [1]
  • Increase US$ 277.314 million (2013) [1]
  • Increase US$ 275.186 million (2012) [1]
Total assets
  • Increase US$ 2,230.554 million (2013) [2]
  • Increase US$ 1,911.201 million (2012) [1]
Total equity
  • Increase US$ 1,538.712 million (2013) [2]
  • Increase US$ 1,329.4 million (2012) [1]
Number of employees
 4180 (2015)
Website www.f5.com

F5 Networks, Inc. is a multinational American company that specializes in application delivery networking (ADN) technology that optimizes the delivery of network-based applications and the security, performance, availability of servers, data storage devices, and other network resources. F5 is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has development, manufacturing, and sales/marketing offices worldwide. F5 originally manufactured and sold some of the industry's first load balancing products. In 2010 and 2011, F5 Networks was on Fortune's list of 100 Fastest-Growing Companies worldwide.[3] The company was also rated one of the top ten best-performing stocks by S&P 500 in 2010.[4]

F5 offers products in various segments of the application delivery controller (ADC) market. According to Gartner, in 2010 F5 had "a continued market-leading position"[5] in the application delivery controller market and the advanced platform application delivery controller market. As of June 2011, Gartner cites the most significant competitors (in terms of market share) as Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, and Radware.

Corporate history

F5 Networks, originally named F5 Labs,[6] was established in 1996.[7] The company name was inspired by the 1996 movie Twister, in which reference was made to the fastest and most powerful tornado on the Fujita Scale: F5.

F5's first product was a load balancer called BIG-IP. When a server went down or became overloaded, BIG-IP directed traffic away from that server to other servers that could handle the load. In June 1999, the company went public as F5 Networks and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange (NASDAQ: FFIV). As it was in 1999, corporate focus in 2013 remains on providing network intelligence that enables customers to respond quickly to change, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and provide differentiated offerings that help increase revenue.

Through internal development and acquisitions, F5 extended its reach beyond load balancing, producing a range of integrated products for Application Delivery Networking. These products seek to improve the delivery of web-based applications by attempting to make them run faster and more securely.

Acquisitions

Products

BIG-IP

F5's BIG-IP product family comprises purpose-built hardware, modularized software, and virtualized solutions that run the F5 TMOS operating system.[17][18] Depending on the appliance selected, one or more BIG-IP product modules can be added to a BIG-IP device to deliver multiple networking functions on a single, unified platform.

BIG-IP appliances

On the line of BIG-IP appliances released between 2008 and 2010, the hardware models used a single custom-fabricated system board. The previous platforms had two internal boards — a PC/server-type motherboard connected to a switchplane. Some models included hardware SSL acceleration for key exchanges and bulk encryption/decryption provided by Cavium Networks, and hardware compression assistance. The new hardware used Intel CPUs, but some previous models included AMD Opteron CPUs. Hardware models included a front LCD panel for configuration and monitoring and a separate service processor for out-of-band management.

The Viprion is a chassis that can hold up to four blades for enhanced redundancy and performance using clustered multiprocessing. In early 2010 F5 released a BIG-IP LTM virtual appliance for VMware.

The 2010 model line-up was, with approximate best-case throughput indicated:[19]

Model Advertised throughput
BIG-IP LTM Virtual Edition 10 Mbit/s, 200 Mbit/s or 1 Gbit/s
BIG-IP 1600 1 Gbit/s
BIG-IP 3600 2 Gbit/s
BIG-IP 3900 4 Gbit/s
BIG-IP 6900 6 Gbit/s
BIG-IP 8900 12 Gbit/s
BIG-IP 8950 20 Gbit/s
BIG-IP 11050 42 Gbit/s
Viprion 2400 Up to 160 Gbit/s L4 & Up to 72  Gbit/s L7. Per Blade Up to 40G L4 & Up to 20G L7
Viprion 4480 Up to 320 Gbit/s[20]

BIG-IP product modules

BIG-IP software development history

On September 7, 2004 F5 Networks released version 9.0 of the BIG-IP software in addition to a new collection of BIG-IP appliances on which customers could run said software. Version 9.0 was significantly different than the previous versions of BIG-IP. The significant changes include:

On April 3, 2009, F5 Networks released version 10.0 of the BIG-IP software. BIG-IP v10 is a major release supporting the company goals of "Unified Application and Data Delivery Services". This is the company vision on how applications, servers, storage, and network resources are managed in an organization.

Version 10 of BIG-IP contained new features to reduce latency, remove congestion or other 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.

BIG-IP software features

FirePass

The FirePass is an SSL VPN appliance and comes in the following models:[23]

Model Recommended Concurrent Users
FirePass Virtual Edition Up to 2000
FirePass 1200 100
FirePass 4100 500
FirePass 4300 2000

Compared to a traditional IPsec VPN, FirePass and other competing SSL VPNs have the following differences:

ARX Series

The ARX series is a series of file virtualization 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

Enterprise Manager is an F5 product that provides centralized management of multiple F5 BIG-IP devices. Enterprise Manager is available both as a physical and virtual appliance.

BIG-IQ

BIG-IQ is an emerging control plane for BIG-IP devices. F5 describes BIG-IQ as an intelligent framework for managing BIG-IP devices and application services, irrespective of their form factors (hardware, software or cloud) or deployment model (on-premises, private/public cloud or hybrid). BIG-IQ supports integration with other ecosystem participants such as public cloud providers, and orchestration engines through cloud connectors and through a comprehensive set of open RESTful APIs. Complementing the orchestration capability of BIG-IQ is a multi-tenant approach to management. This allows organizations to move closer to IT as a Service without concern that it might affect the stability or security of the services fabric.[24]

Three BIG-IQ modules are currently available:

Additional BIG-IQ modules have been described but not formally announced.

LineRate

LineRate is a high-performance, software-based load balancer. It can be deployed on bare-metal x86 hardware or in virtual machine environments, including Amazon Web Services, VMWare, and KVM.

LineRate includes Node.js for running scripts. When a script is created for a Virtual Server, it sits in the data path and can add very custom logic to an application. There are several demonstration use-cases of scripting provided by F5 on the LineRate web site. They include:

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "F5 NETWORKS INC 2013 Annual Report Form (10-K)" (XBRL). United States Securities and Exchange Commission. November 22, 2013.
  2. 1 2 "F5 NETWORKS INC 2014 Q2 Quarterly Report Form (10-Q)" (XBRL). United States Securities and Exchange Commission. May 8, 2014.
  3. ↑ "100 Fastest-growing companies". CNN. Retrieved 2010-08-27.
  4. ↑ Frank Byrt. "10 Best-Performing S&P 500 Stocks of 2010". TheStreet. Retrieved 29 October 2015.
  5. ↑ "Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers". Retrieved 2010-08-27.
  6. ↑ http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/Thomson_Venture_Economics/F5_Networks_Inc_AKA_F5_Labs_Inc-Y45115
  7. ↑ "F5 Networks Form 10-K". Retrieved 2012-05-02.
  8. ↑ "Quick Takes: F5 lassos uRoam". Retrieved 2010-08-27.
  9. ↑ John Leyden (July 1, 2004). "F5 snaps up MagniFire". The Register. Retrieved July 16, 2013.
  10. ↑ "F5 to acquire Swan Labs". Retrieved 2010-08-27.
  11. ↑ "F5 Networks Completes Acquisition of Acopia Networks". Retrieved 2010-08-17.
  12. ↑ "F5 Acquires Intellectual Property Assets of Crescendo Networks". Retrieved 2 May 2012.
  13. ↑ "F5 Networks Acquires Traffix Systems". Retrieved 2 May 2012.
  14. ↑ "F5 Networks Acquires LineRate Systems". Retrieved 11 Feb 2013.
  15. ↑ "F5 Networks Acquires Versafe to Help Customers Protect Against Online Fraud". Retrieved 2 Nov 2013.
  16. ↑ "F5 Networks Acquires Defense.Net". Retrieved 5 Aug 2014.
  17. ↑ Steven Iveson (2013-04-20). "What the Heck Is F5 Networks’ TMOS?". packetpushers.net. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
  18. 1 2 Ryan Kearny; Steve Graves (2008-12-14). "No operating system is an island". embedded.com. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
  19. ↑ "BIG-IP Hardware Data Sheet" (PDF). October 28, 2010. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 3, 2010. Retrieved July 17, 2013.
  20. ↑ "Press Release". Retrieved 2012-05-02.
  21. ↑ "Manual Chapter: Understanding Core System Services". f5.com. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
  22. ↑ "Overview of BIG-IP Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) CPU and RAM usage". f5.com. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
  23. ↑ "FirePass Data Sheet" (PDF). Retrieved 2010-08-17.
  24. ↑ Sean Michael Kerner (2013-04-25). "F5 Gears up for BIG-IQ". enterprisenetworkingplanet.com. Retrieved 2013-12-15.

External links

Coordinates: 47°37′20″N 122°21′49″W / 47.622219°N 122.363493°W / 47.622219; -122.363493

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, May 04, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.