Organizations that pursue increasingly agile IT deployment models are turning to software-defined data centers, which enables them to seamlessly integrate application services into data center operations, while reducing management complexity and operations costs.
At VMworld 2012, F5 Networks announced plans to integrate its Big-IP Application Delivery Controller (ADC) services with VMware vCloud and vSphere infrastructure solutions. This integration will take advantage of services, including load balancing, SSL offloading, web acceleration and web application firewall.
The combined solution will leverage the VMware Ready for Networking and Security Program to automate and orchestrate key application delivery networking services in support of software-defined data centers. That will help enterprises to provision, manage, and orchestrate application delivery services alongside virtualized application workloads throughout their IT infrastructures.
"Getting the performance you want from your applications in a virtualized environment often comes with the tradeoff of added complexity," said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. "Technology partnerships like the one between F5 and VMware help customers overcome these complexities, and help organizations manage applications in a virtual environment within a simple, efficient and secure framework."
"Our technologies can augment the capabilities of VMware vSphere and vCloud Director, enabling IT professionals to efficiently deploy and optimize application delivery services across virtualized and cloud environments," said Jim Ritchings, vice president of business development at F5.
F5 Big-IP solutions can implement application-specific policies to govern application security, performance, and availability. The joint solution is equally valuable to cloud environments using vCloud Director, as well as non-cloud virtual environments built on vSphere. It can also be implemented with vSphere using either Big-IP physical devices or virtual editions.