F5 providing visibility & control to maximize cloud computing investments

These days, there is a growing tendency for unifying all modes and aspects of security management. How do you evaluate concrete development in the setting up of a datacenter management?
As enterprises innovate to cater to increasing business demand and stiffer competition, datacenter has grown both in complexity and sophistication. The key for datacenter is to deliver the best end-user experience by providing an adaptive architecture to secure, accelerate and ensure that vital assets are always on. Applications not only need to be consistently accessible to prevent costly downtime and lost productivity, but it has to meet end-user’s demand of responsiveness and speed. 

What solution and advantages do you offer with regard to WAN optimization/Web application?
Application performance on the WAN is affected by a large number of factors that can’t be solved by adding bandwidth alone. The natural behaviour of application protocols that were not designed for WAN conditions, application protocols that engage in excessive handshaking, and the serialization of the applications themselves can all limit performance.

The new BIG-IP v10.1 release offers advanced services featuring enhanced web access management, TMOS-integrated geolocation data, and accelerated data transfers over the WAN. BIG IP WAN Optimization Module (WOM) saves time and money by speeding data transfers over the WAN and enabling traffic between BIG IP devices to be optimized, encrypted, and highly available.

BIG-IP WebAccelerator is an advanced Web application delivery solution that overcomes performance issues involving browsers, Web application platforms, and WAN latency. By decreasing page download times, WebAccelerator offloads servers, decreases bandwidth usage, and ensures the productivity of application end-users.

What are the major changes happening in the security solutions market? Which specific segments do you see as drivers?
In any and every business and infrastructure, users, applications, and data are under constant threat from unauthorized access and malicious attacks. With flexible, efficient, and cost-effective security, F5 can help minimize the risks that come with serving customers and sustaining a mobile workforce. From enterprise and access security to network and application protection, F5's unified security solutions give a comprehensive approach to protecting complex environment from constantly changing threats. F5 specializes in access, application, data, enterprise and network security solutions.

Telecommunications, Financial Services and Government Services are growth verticals for F5. We see many enterprises in these verticals moving toward a unified application delivery platform, spurred mainly by business demanding agility and ease of management. 
What is the market opportunity for security software vendors versus hardware vendors?
In 2008, the security software market grew at 19 per cent, and Gartner anticipates the market to grow 13 per cent in 2010 as revenue will total $16.3 billion. According to business insights, security hardware and appliances are expected to be the fastest- growing segment of the entire hardware market, estimated to grow at a CAGR of 7.7 per cent over the period 2009-2014 to $15.5bn.
However, F5's growth can be attributed to our vision of unified application delivery networking.

How F5 is addressing the virtualization/ Cloud Computing space?
F5 is helping make cloud computing a practical reality for organizations that are running mission-critical applications. In general, developing applications for deployment in the cloud are really no different from developing applications for deployment locally. The tricky part of developing applications for the cloud, whether private or public, is the introduction of load balancing or application delivery into the equation. The same issues that often arise in local deployments requiring load balancing or application delivery services will arise in the cloud.

For organizations that have not yet deployed virtualization technology, their concerns run in two directions: they worry that their network might restrict the operation and benefits of virtualization; and they worry that virtualization might hamper their network.
Network virtualization is another virtualization category that F5 has implemented since the release of TMOS in 2004. VLAN and SNAT support are the two most fundamental examples of network virtualization. While typical data center architecture dictates that all network virtualization tasks happen at the edge of the data center, F5 appliances support multiple levels of network virtualization “behind” the network switching infrastructure, which is propagated all the way through application-routing decisions. Policies can be built and shared across multiple public and private virtual networks. Additional examples of TMOS-supported network virtualization include basic Virtual IPs (VIPs), link aggregation (typically referred to as trunking), and rate shaping.

Network Virtualization may be the most ambiguous definition of virtualization. For brevity, the scope here is relegated to virtual IP management and segmentation. A simple example of IP virtualization is a VLAN: a single Ethernet port may support multiple virtual connections from multiple IP addresses and networks, but they are virtually segmented using VLAN tags.