Stories about: F5 Networks

Juniper has the most to gain from Nortel's tenuous financial position, according to a bulletin issued this month by investment firm Oppenheimer & Co.

As IT evolves to support everything from virtualized desktops to mobile and social networking, new advances promise to change the way the business side of the house gets the job done. Here's a look at some of IT departments' game-changing technologies and how they affect the everyday worker.

F5 Networks has issued a new version of its FirePass software so it can apply group access policies to mobile devices as the log-in to SSL VPNs.

The City of Boroondara has ditched a "cumbersome" IT security system and standardised on Unified Threat Management (UTM) across its local and distributed sites.

Considering a WAN accelerator? Kevin Dunn, director of network operations at First Command, says these three features are must-haves. Read our case study on First Command's WAN acceleration project here.

First Command, a financial services firm with US$18.6 billion in managed assets and nearly 300,000 clients across the United States, saw the promise of the Internet as early as 1998. It quickly Web-enabled its core applications to support not only its own employees and individual customers, but also its far-flung network of financial advisors and their staffers.

F5 Networks is beefing up its two low-end Big-IP Web-application optimization boxes so they have more throughput, and is upgrading the software that runs on Big IP devices to boost security.

Whether you call them application delivery controllers, application accelerators, application traffic managers, or just load balancers, the solutions for scaling out Web sites and improving the performance of Web applications have come a long way from their humble beginnings. The result is a great deal of choice in the marketplace, from bare-bones appliances with basic functionality to high-capacity switch-based systems that handle Web traffic in wildly sophisticated ways.

Cisco plans to claim its piece of the virtual data-center pie with products that automatically provision, manage and optimize virtualized environments.

Tools for speeding sluggish applications traditionally are of two types: application-delivery controllers designed to ease the load on Web servers, and WAN optimization devices aimed at mitigating network latency and bandwidth constraints. Some say it's time for these two to consolidate.

When Rich De Brino agreed to let a start-up come on-site and demonstrate how its technology could optimize video applications by aggregating multiple network connections, he didn't make it easy on the vendor.