Any opinions on Top Layer and the pros and cons of load balancing at various layers?
biz.yahoo.com
Monday January 17, 8:04 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
Top Layer Networks and F5 Networks Sign OEM Agreement
Combined technologies intended to introduce superior intelligence and QoS for Internet traffic management and prioritization of more than 225 applications and transactions
SEATTLE and WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2000-- F5 Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq:FFIV - news), a leading provider of Internet traffic and content management products and Top Layer Networks, a leading provider of application controlled switching, today announced a strategic OEM relationship to produce the industry's first Application Balancing(TM) product.
Application Balancing is designed to enable organizations, for the first time, to control and optimize the handling and performance of the full scope of business-critical traffic. Under this agreement, Top Layer Networks will OEM the software component of F5 Network's BIG/ip® Controller, combining it with Top Layer Networks' award-winning AppSwitch(TM) family of switching solutions.
''This is the kind of partnership that makes sense -- one in which the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts,'' said Valerie O'Connell, Research Director, Systems and Network Management at the Aberdeen Group. ''That's when you see customers getting real value.''
Application Balancing will combine state-of-the-art web content high availability and load balancing with Application Control(TM). This combination will allow traffic from web and non-web based business applications to be balanced with the same rich functionality that today's web load balancing products bring to web content hosting. In addition, Application Control will provide very rich quality of service (QoS) capabilities for real-time and business critical traffic. As a result, service providers and enterprises will be better able to guarantee that mission-critical transactions, from e-Commerce, ERP, and CRM applications to latency-sensitive traffic, such as streaming video and audio content, are automatically prioritized and completed with the highest possible efficiency.
''Given the accelerating performance demands on both provider and enterprise networks, the importance of providing our customers with the highest possible levels of intelligence, QoS, and load balancing is clear. This is the driver behind our selection of the industry's top Internet traffic and content management company, F5, as our strategic partner,'' said Bruce Cohen, Top Layer Networks' president and CEO.
''Our companies' technologies are highly complementary and we share the same objective of giving customers the ability to have greater levels of intelligence and control of Internet traffic,'' said Tom Pettigrew, Senior Director of Corporate Development at F5 Networks. ''Our relationship with TopLayer should benefit customers by giving them an effective way to seamlessly distinguish and prioritize all types of traffic, ultimately enabling them to achieve their goal of providing their users with superior performance and the highest level of service.''
A related white paper discussing TopLayer's and F5 Networks' products and technologies can be found at f5.com
About F5 Networks
F5 Networks is a leader in Internet Traffic and Content Management products. The Company's integrated suite of high-performance products automatically and intelligently manage Internet traffic and content to improve the availability and performance of mission-critical Internet servers and applications. F5 Networks helps companies avoid the risk of being burdened with ill-performing networks that do not meet end user expectations, while enabling network administrators to better control and predict the performance of their infrastructure. F5 Networks' products are designed to provide a new level of fault tolerance by shielding users from system failure; optimize response times to user requests and data flow; and cost-effectively manage an organization's Internet infrastructure. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Columbus, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, The Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom. F5 Networks is located on the web at www.f5.com.
F5 Networks (Nasdaq:FFIV - news) Internet Traffic Management products support a wide range of operating systems and hardware platforms including those from: Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW - news), Hewlett Packard (NYSE:HWP - news), Compaq (NYSE:CPQ - news), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL - news), IBM (NYSE:IBM - news) and Intel (Nasdaq:INTC - news). F5 products work with leading IP-based applications, including legacy host, mainframe, Java, CORBA-based, and client/server applications from vendors such as SAP (NYSE:SAP - news), BAAN (Nasdaq:BAANF - news), Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL - news), Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL - news), and PeopleSoft (Nasdaq:PSFT - news).
About Top Layer Networks
Top Layer Networks makes networking switches used to build Business Driven Networks(TM) for enterprise and service provider organizations. Using information from all seven layers of the OSI model, Top Layer products support business application and user prioritization, traffic admission control/intra-organizational firewalling, application-level monitoring, and services accounting. Its AppSwitch family resolves the challenges of supporting today's dynamic application environments. Top Layer Networks' Business Driven Network architecture and its AppSwitch family represent a new class of switch solution, and are the first products to ensure that business-critical and delay-sensitive traffic receive the best possible processing. The AppSwitch is the only product available that lets Application Service Providers identify, control, and prioritize both HTTP-based and all non-HTTP-based traffic. It is the recipient of Networld + Interop's ''Best of Show'' Award for Spring '99, and was named ''Best Networking Product'' at the recent VAR Vision Conference. Additional information is available at www.TopLayer.com. |
