F5’s BIG-IP Edge Gateway Solution Provides Breakthrough Approach to Unifying and Optimising Access to the Data Center

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced the new BIG-IP Edge Gateway^™ product, providing enterprise organisations with a high performance, next-generation remote access solution that delivers LAN-speed application performance for remote and mobile workers. This solution effectively solves the challenges that enterprise IT personnel face due to the massive growth of mobile and remote users. With BIG-IP Edge Gateway, F5 provides the first Application Delivery Controller (ADC) on the market that unifies secure SSL VPN access, dynamic access and optimisation control, and application acceleration for remote users—regardless of the device or access network—on a single, scalable platform.

Details

With this release, F5 continues to deliver on its vision of unifying its ADC solution set and redefining how customers implement, share and cost-effectively extend their Application Delivery Network all the way to the client. With approximately five times the scaling capability and up to an eight times improvement in application performance, the BIG-IP Edge Gateway offers enterprises significant ROI at less than half the cost of alternative, disparate technologies.

The new BIG-IP Edge Gateway enables customers to:

         Dramatically Reduce CapEx with Unified Services and Simplified Management 

The BIG-IP Edge Gateway solution simplifies device management by ensuring access across heterogeneous applications services, access networks, and data resources. With the free BIG-IP Edge Client^™ solution—included with BIG-IP Edge Gateway—customers can combine acceleration, endpoint security, and automatic network roaming persistence for an improved end-user experience and increased workforce efficiency. In addition, web application acceleration yields significant performance gains for remote and mobile users.

         Provide Secure, Accelerated Remote Access that Easily Scales to Support User Demand

BIG-IP Edge Gateway enables organisations to cost-effectively scale their access networks to unprecedented levels. The solution accelerates and optimises applications, yielding LAN-speed performance gains (up to eight times faster), and ensures that users are always seamlessly connected via F5’s new BIG-IP Edge Client^™ with smart connection technology. Smart connection technology’s unique persistence and access intelligence makes sure that as a user roams networks—wireless (802.11), cell (3G and LTE), or wired—they stay connected, and the integrity of their application session is protected. The client also includes best-in-class endpoint security and unique application and network acceleration.

         Implement Context-Aware Networking through Access Policy Enforcement

BIG-IP Edge Gateway offers granular access policy enforcement. With features such as Visual Policy Editor (VPE), plus integrated authentication and endpoint inspection, access management becomes simpler, centralised and more cost-effective. Now, IT staff can provide application access based on context by taking into account the user’s policy, identifying user location for redirection to local resources and supporting single sign-on for most directory services across all application types, devices and operating systems. This capability significantly reduces both cost and complexity.

         Prioritise Applications for Optimal Performance and User Productivity

With BIG-IP Edge Gateway, IT staff can design application prioritisation into access policies to ensure that bandwidth is reserved for high priority applications. For example, VoIP traffic can be managed and prioritised so it is always clear, instead of choppy due to packet loss and latency. Furthermore, with F5’s unique client-side QoS functions, customers have the superior service levels they need to increase user productivity.

Supporting Quotes

“BIG-IP Edge Gateway and BIG-IP v10.1 software provide the most intelligent, cost-effective access management architecture in the market,” said Kurt Hansen, Managing Director of F5 Networks in Australia and New Zealand. “The explosive growth of mobile workers creates a huge challenge for enterprise IT teams who must make sure their access networks can scale and support a superior user experience. By unifying SSL VPN access, powerful security policy and access control, and application acceleration on a single ADC, organisations can expect to reduce costs by up to 5 times due to lower OpEx and CapEx. The solution’s smart connection technology affords users ‘always on’ hassle-free connectivity and improved performance regardless of the access network. Other solutions available today require multiple clients from different vendors, costing hundreds of dollars per client.”

“We see a number of market drivers for a next-generation access and acceleration solution, which is why we selected F5’s BIG-IP Edge Gateway for our global managed service offering,” said Evan Loats, Remote Access Product Manager at CSC. “Our offering for remote working, CSC Connect, requires the ability to deliver fully virtualised, highly scalable services in a cloud-based delivery model. Remote workers need more than just access—they want a better user experience, application awareness and acceleration. The proliferation of mobile devices and increased incidence of disaster scenarios demand the ability to scale easily to very large numbers of concurrent users with no compromise in security. F5’s BIG-IP solution combines all the key capabilities to enable CSC to differentiate our services and help customers achieve their business goals more quickly and cost-effectively.”

“Many companies are looking for secure access solutions to support the rapid rise in new remote users, stemming from increasingly distributed user populations,” said Jeff Wilson, Principal Analyst at Infonetics Research. “At the same time, these organisations are increasingly reliant on flexible access capabilities to make company materials available to contractors and partners, support disaster recovery scenarios and leverage broadband access from a wide variety of locations and device types—and they’re looking for solutions with revolutionary capital and operational cost models. F5’s BIG-IP Edge Gateway offers this kind of revolutionary cost model without sacrificing performance or ease of use.”

FishNet Security continues to be a market leader in helping businesses, government, educational institutions, and other organisations define the true risks in their environment. “We’re particularly excited about the latest release of BIG-IP as it’s tightly aligned with our customers’ key IT security priorities,” said Gordon Shevlin, Executive Vice President of FishNet Security. “What’s compelling is F5’s unique ability to layer the necessary services, including edge-of-the-network services, into a unified platform. The new BIG-IP release will help customers scale, simplify management and ensure the user is always connected. F5 converges access and acceleration, which is game changing for the market and a solution our customers will embrace.”

Availability

The BIG-IP Edge Gateway is available today. In addition, BIG-IP v10.1 software and all associated product modules are also currently available. For more information about BIG-IP solutions, please visit www.f5.com/products/big-ip/.

Additional Resources

         BIG-IP Edge Gateway – SlideShare Presentation

         BIG-IP Edge Gateway Product Overview

         Unified Access and Optimization with F5 BIG-IP Edge Gateway – White Paper

         F5 Customer Interview with CSC – Podcast

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on ensuring the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5's flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5's vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organizations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

F5, BIG-IP, Edge Gateway, and Edge Client are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

This press release may contain forward looking statements relating to future events or future financial performance that involve risks and uncertainties. Such statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or "continue," or the negative of such terms or comparable terms. These statements are only predictions and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these statements based upon a number of factors including those identified in the company's filings with the SEC.