Cisco ACE vs. F5 LTM

By Brad Reese on Tue, 02/12/08 - 2:26am.

Application delivery networking vendor F5 has published:

Application Delivery Controller Performance Report

A comprehensive performance evaluation of the:

	Cisco ACE (Application Control Engine Module) 8-Gbps
	Citrix NetScaler Enterprise Edition 12000
	F5 8800 BIG-IP LTM

Interestingly, Greg Ferro - CCIE No. 6920 Routing and Switching, author of the Etherealmind Blog published:

Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) - introduction and comparison with F5

Which explains why Greg is considering the deployment of both the F5 LTM and the Cisco ACE in his network.

Cisco ACE Introduction

The ACE comes in two formats, either a standalone 1RU appliance, or as a Cat6500 module.

The appliance seems to have a faster development cycle and gets the new features early, but the module has more performance in every aspect.

And what amazing performance it is, this thing can perform load balancing at up 16 Gigabits per second, which is about four times more than the F5 8800 (note some conditions apply in the current versions of code, due to ASIC inputs at 8 Gigabits per second but expected to be resolved in future code releases), and at a price about two thirds of an F5 8800.

Note: I accept raw speed is not the only measure of performance see more later.

But not many people are going to need a load balancer at that sort of performance, and the ACE module is a key part of the Cisco SONA strategy.

To this end the ACE module can have up to 250 virtual instances, more than 340000 sustained TCP connection, 15000 SSL TPS.

So this thing has high performance across the board.

Greg continues his comparison analysis with power reduction, functional comparison, virtualisation, management and futures.

Finally, Greg concludes that for large data centres, you will most likely use F5 LTM where you need it for a specific feature or task, but you would choose to have an ACE module for most load balancing tasks.

Read Greg's blog entry in its entirety

Furthermore, you may also have interest in the Miercom Lab Test Report:

F5 8400 BIG-IP v9.2.3 vs. Cisco 6500 Application Control Engine Module v A.1.3

as well as more

Cisco vs. Competitor Lab Tests

Video Overview of the Cisco ACE Module