F5 offers online expertise

F5 Networks last week unveiled a “Solution Center,” which the company says provides online documentation to help businesses increase the return on investment on their applications and network infrastructure.

The Solution Center consists of several components – including a public Web site, a test lab, and a demo lab. Other resources available through the Solution Center include white papers, application briefs, solution briefs and deployment guides.

F5 says the tools it will make available can show users how to achieve superior availability, scale, security and performance on their existing and future enterprise and Web services applications. 

The Solution Center’s Test Lab, where test engineers conduct application integration and interoperability testing with third-party applications, will provide a means for customers and partners to experience application traffic management products and leading infrastructure software. The center will test software such as BEA WebLogic, Microsoft .Net, Oracle9i Application Server, Siebel 7, as well as intrusion detection systems, enterprise resource planning and financial services.

As a resource that F5 continuously updates, the Solution Center will expand as more applications are tested, validated and documented. Anyone can access the Solution Center section of the F5 Web site, where content is organized by application and technology type.

And for F5 Alliance Partners, the Solution Center can provide proof of interoperability between their applications and F5 products. It can help to demonstrate how customers can achieve higher uptime and better application performance while increasing their ROI, F5 says.