F5 takes it up a notch

There’s a new top of the line for F5 Networks’ Big-IP application delivery platform.

The Big-IP 8800, unveiled last week, is designed to satisfy IT managers’ appetite for more horsepower to handle bandwidth-intensive applications as well as let them consolidate application-layer networking services in a single device.

Under the covers is F5’s Big-IP v9.4 software, which can process up to 48,000 SSL transactions per second and yields up to 8Gbps throughput for Layer 7 processing and up to 6Gbps throughput for compression processing.

The Big-IP 8800 doubles the performance of F5’s previous top-of-the-line box, the 8400, says Phillip Pao, a product manager at F5. One way the vendor achieved the performance hike is through the use of “clustered multiprocessing,” according to Pao.

There’s an AMD chip with four processors in the Big-IP 8800. Rather than assign each processor a single task, such as compression or SSL encryption and decryption, F5 symmetrically balances processing chores across all four cores so that no one core is doing all the work while others are underutilized, Pao explains. “It’s the idea that you can load-balance linearly across multiple processors within a single box,” he says.

With the new platform, F5 also worked to help IT managers simplify the building, testing and deployment of networked applications by making it possible for them to divide the system into discrete administrative domains. In this way, a network manager could give an application administrator limited configuration control needed to test a new application under production conditions or tune performance based on real network throughput.

This cuts down on the number of simple change requests the network team has to deal with each time an application is rolled out, Pao says.

The Big-IP 8800 hardware platform is available today starting at $90,000. Existing F5 customers with current maintenance agreements can upgrade to the Big-IP v9.4 software at no additional cost.