F5: Application Infrastructure Solutions
Application infrastructure, comprised of application servers, web servers, and often database servers, is a core component in most network architectures. This part of the network infrastructure delivers high performance application services to the LAN as well as to employees, partners and customers on the WAN. Some of the key functionality of application infrastructure includes transaction management, clustering, reliable application-to-application messaging, system management, advanced application development tools, proprietary access, and interoperability with legacy technologies. These devices allow organizations to integrate, manipulate and deliver data from a variety of backend solutions including databases, webbased applications, and web-enabled legacy applications. Application infrastructure provides a powerful platform to support and extend a broad range of application services from small, taskoriented and limited scale applications, to large, advanced e-commerce transaction systems supporting thousands of users.
As web-based and web-enabled applications become more sophisticated and more frequently employed, application infrastructure will play an increasingly signifi cant role within the enterprise. However, because the application infrastructure plays such a key role in IT strategies, it also poses some signifi cant challenges:
Network Performance - Network effi ciency is hampered when server resources are used to provide other networking tasks such as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, authorization and compression. Software-based scalability, security, and connection solutions each dramatically reduce the overall performance of the application infrastructure. Not only does this reduction in performance require additional servers and expensive software licenses, it also increases deployment complexity, integration hassle and administrative overhead. Bandwidth Consumption - As enterprise applications and their content become more sophisticated and accessible, the risk of bandwidth consumption also increases. Application infrastructure increasingly must support a variety of IP applications such as voice, video, and data services on the same network, while still delivering slower or legacy applications. Organizations need a solution that can maximize current resources and investments while improving application delivery and fl exibility. Connection Management - Depending on the type of application served, the enterprise’s application infrastructure is not always able to manage complex connection requirements effi ciently. For instance, maintaining session persistence, which can be required by in-memory applications, can reduce server performance by 20-30%. Further, organizations do not always have the ability to gracefully distribute connections among servers when removing application servers from a cluster. Security and Accessibility - Organizations need a solution that can secure the application infrastructure while maintaining network fl exibility and accessibility. Some application servers offer software-based security solutions, but transaction processing can be limited dramatically when these servers perform SSL encryption and decryption. Some estimates suggest this reduction can be as great as a 90% reduction in standard non-HTTPS performance, ultimately requiring a signifi cant investment in additional servers to support secure web-enabled applications. Scalability - Application infrastructure deployments often limit network scalability by utilizing only standard DNS or a Round-Robin load balancing algorithm. In this approach, application servers introduce single points of failure and limit the ability of application server clusters to scale to deliver true 99.999% uptime.
With powerful local and global traffi c management network devices, F5 Networks offers valuable benefi ts for enterprise application infrastructure deployment. Hardware-based traffi c management technologies such as F5’s offer signifi cant advantages over software only solutions in this area. Key benefi ts include a broader range of load balancing algorithms, HTTP compression, the ability to avoid unavailable servers, SSL acceleration, and more effi cient traffic/application management. In addition to these advantages, F5 has established itself as a leader in enhancing the scalability of application infrastructure and optimizing network performance through intelligent Layer 7 management and extended application health checking. The global leader in SSL for network devices, F5 offers 40-60% performance improvements for application infrastructure over software-based security solutions. To its foundation of intelligent application traffi c management, version 9 of the BIG-IP system adds a suite of application acceleration and optimization features. BIG-IP v9, with its unique Traffi c Management Operating System (TMOS) architecture, is designed to increase network effi ciency and control while improving end-user performance with fast, secure application delivery. These enhancements provide increased performance for users accessing applications over the WAN. The effectiveness of TM/OS was demonstrated using the Gomez Performance Network, which uses real clients from all corners of the globe. In recent Gomez Performance Network testing, these industry leading performance and optimization features resulted in greater than 125% application performance improvements. For the remote workforce, F5’s FirePass Controller SSL VPN extends this level of performance and access securely to remote users. The FirePass device provides access to the internal application infrastructure, including devices like BEA WebLogic Server and SAP Application Servers, as easily as from inside the corporate LAN. It also delivers granular access control to intranet resources on a group basis. The controller’s compression capabilities provide additional performance enhancement and server offl oad for application infrastructure deployments while securely delivering business-critical content. With this industry-leading combination of intelligent application traffic management, load balancing, and optimization features, the F5 solution delivers the following application infrastructure solutions: Application Acceleration and TCP Optimization - Version 9 of the BIG-IP system provides industry-leading application acceleration and optimization, with a suite of new TCP Express features to facilitate this functionality. BIG-IP Traffi c Management Operating System (TM/OS) architecture provides the foundation for TCP optimization with independent client and server side TCP stacks. Client and server side connections are independently optimized up and down the TCP stack, providing dramatic improvement for WAN effi ciency. TCP Express functionality acts as a broker between noncompliant TCP stacks running across servers within the corporate data center, further increasing network effi ciency. TCP Express optimizations reduce application response time and minimize errors associated with lost and re-ordered packets, thus signifi cantly improving end-user experience for both dial-up and broadband connections. This communication streamlining process improves bandwidth link utilization and reduces overhead by increasing server capacity. Fast Cache, Compression and SSL Acceleration - From its central position in the network, the BIG-IP device can take on a variety of resource intensive tasks such as HTTP Compression and SSL termination. By offl oading these processes, the BIG-IP system increases network speed while freeing application infrastructure to deliver content more effi ciently. The BIG-IP solution also provides Fast Cache intelligent memory-based caching. By allowing caching at the BIG-IP on a per application basis, this function improves processing power, content delivery control, and server cluster performance. Thus the BIG-IP system increases the enterprise ROI by minimizing bandwidth consumption and offl oading server processing. Advanced Health Checking and Intelligent Traffic Management - Integrating the BIG-IP solution with the application infrastructure provides a specialized Layer 4-7 architecture with superior processing power, optimizing application speed and Quality of Service levels. Unlike other networking products on the market, the BIG-IP product can read any value(s) of an IP-based packet header or payload and direct it to the appropriate resource. Based on precise business criteria and requirements, the Universal Inspection Engine (UIE) and iRules™ allow an organization easily to incorporate application specifi c logic into the BIG-IP product. Additionally, The BIG-IP system detects a variety of device failures to ensure that mission-critical resources are responding properly. The BIG-IP solution offers advanced content and application health checks such as Extended Content Verifi cation (ECV) and Extended Application Verifi cation (EAV) that simulate an end user request and monitor the true availability of content. Data Source Access and Integration - With iControl, the BIG-IP system’s open application program interface, applications and services can communicate with and infl uence the behavior of the underlying network. Made available as a free SDK, the iControl architecture provides integration control of load balancing and traffi c management, content delivery and fulfi llment infrastructure. The resulting integrated web application, service, and network environment can be dynamically tuned based on application, server and customer needs. Secure Remote Access - F5’s FirePass SSL VPN solution enables remote users to access applications as easily as from inside the corporate LAN. Once authenticated by FirePass, users pass through the corporate fi rewall and are able to access web services, applications and data from any device with a browser, from any location, without having to re-authenticate when accessing multiple resources. The FirePass controller’s caching and compression capabilities provide additional performance enhancement and server offl oad while securely delivering business-critical content.
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