F5 Revs Up Big-IP Load Balancing

With the new release, solution providers can offer customers high availability, scalability, security and enhanced performance for applications such as SIP-based voice over IP, Web services or mobile applications, said Chris Archey, Big-IP product manager for F5.

Big-IP now looks deeper into a packet to understand and act upon protocols such as XML, SQL and SIP, Archey said. Before, these functions needed to be designed into the applications or handled with point solutions, he said.

With F5's new Universal Inspection Engine and iRules built into Big-IP, the software can read any value of an IP packet header and direct it, Archey said. The iRules function allows a company to incorporate application-specific logic into Big-IP rather than the application itself, he said.

As an example, customers can read, switch and filter on mobile phone numbers found in the payload of a packet, database operation types found in the IP stream or XML payload information, Archey said.

Harminder Brar, corporate account manager for Yorba Linda, Calif.-based solution provider Future Computing Solutions, said F5's solution is unique. "We're now able to look much deeper into the traffic and make deeper decisions than we could before," Brar said.

Jay Bhatt, director of professional services at Future Computing Solutions, said the ability to load-balance application traffic will allow for some interesting solutions.

For example, Bhatt said, a customer could avoid the cost of a SAN by using load balancing between database servers instead of clustering.

F5's application switch platforms range from $14,990 for the 8-port Big-IP 1000 to $57,990 for a redundant pair of 24-port Big-IP 5100s.