Recent FFIV news........F5 Networks' Award Winning 3-DNS Controller Fills a Critical Void for Global e-Business Networks
SEATTLE, Jun 21, 2000 (BUSINESS WIRE) --
F5's wide-area Internet traffic management product addresses
e-commerce and enterprise content delivery requirements --
helping e-Businesses to consistently render superior service,
deliver the right content, and maximize online sales opportunities
F5 Networks, Inc., (Nasdaq: FFIV), the leading provider of Internet traffic and
content management (iTCM) products, today announced the release of 3-DNS(R)
Controller version 2.1, featuring higher performance, more advanced features,
and a smaller footprint.
3-DNS is a wide-area, high availability, intelligent load balancing product for
companies competing in the exploding digital economy. 3-DNS helps Fortune 1000
enterprises, service providers and global e-commerce companies deliver rich and
dynamic content faster and more reliably to end users and customers --
regardless of where they are located. With its unmatched intelligence and robust
feature set, 3-DNS has received multiple awards, such as Network Computing's
prestigious Well-Connected award for best distributed load balancing product, as
well as the Editor's Choice Award.
3-DNS allows e-Businesses to maximize network performance and give their
customers a productive and rich web experience. 3-DNS routes a user's request
using business-specific production rules to the "best" site, which may be
anywhere on a business' geographically distributed network. 3-DNS (which can be
used with F5's BIG-IP(R) Controller or any other local area load balancer)
renders the fastest DNS resolutions, resolving requests for web pages more than
twice as fast as industry standard BIND v8.2.2. No other product can match
3-DNS' flexibility and level of intelligence to help e-Businesses meet their
customer's expectations for a `fast-loading' site. This translates to better
quality of service, increased traffic, and ultimately higher sales
opportunities.
3-DNS yields benefits for all types of e-Businesses that have geographically
dispersed sites.
Three sample scenarios follow:
Scenario A -- I'm ready to buy, but you aren't!
A large e-Business site has distributed their secure servers across a load
balanced wide area network. This eliminates the bottleneck of a single secure
server and e-commerce transaction failure, but introduces the problem of keeping
customers and their transactions together. When customers attempt to check out,
they could be load balanced to another data center with no record of their
transaction.
The result:
Customers have an empty cart -- nothing to checkout and no sale.
How 3-DNS can help:
3-DNS' dynamic persistence feature keeps customers connected to the same data
center through their entire transaction. This ensures that customers and their
transactions stay together. All other requests to the site are load balanced
amongst all the available data centers, so the business can still take advantage
of wide area load balancing.
Scenario B -- Weekend warriors
The traffic load of a popular retail site increases 25% on weekends. The web
administrator must add a virtual server to the site every Friday evening in
order to compensate for the anticipated load of shoppers. The virtual server
must be manually removed the following Monday.
The result:
The already overtaxed web administrator has yet another task that, if skipped or
forgotten, would be detrimental to the site's brand image. Or worse, result in
lost sales.
How 3-DNS can help:
With 3-DNS' custom scripting facility, the web administrator can automatically
schedule the additional virtual server (e.g. add it at 5pm on Friday, remove it
at 8am on Monday), eliminating this weekly, manual task.
Scenario C -- Follow the sun
A company with two data centers -- one located on the East Coast and the other
on the West Coast -- determines that its East Coast servers are overloaded in
the morning as the business day begins. Users experience poor response time and
sometimes cannot access applications.
The result:
Users are frustrated and productivity plummets, hindering business.
How 3-DNS can help:
3-DNS provides control of user traffic on a very granular basis, allowing
administrators to divide the day into equal parts and scripting various
`behaviors' for 3-DNS to literally "follow the sun". In the morning, 3-DNS can
be instructed to seamlessly offload busy East Coast traffic to the still
sleeping West Coast data center. As the day progresses, traffic can be shifted
back to the East, when the West Coast traffic is peaking.
"The 3-DNS Controller is a perfect example of how F5 pays close attention to our
customers' needs and anticipates market requirements," said Marc Goodman, senior
director of marketing at F5 Networks. "While 3-DNS was always ahead of the curve
for the global Internet traffic management market, this version widens the gap
with features like dynamic persistence -- helping e-Businesses reduce the 66%
abandon rate for shopping carts."
3-DNS Controller highlights include:
-- Faster loading content -- 3-DNS customers can expect to
resolve requests for web pages more than twice as fast as the
industry standard using BIND v8.2.2.
-- Integration with existing systems -- 3-DNS can acquire metrics
from a customer's existing local-area load balancing product,
whether it's from F5 or another company. This seamless
integration permits businesses to upgrade their existing
local-area load balancing system to encompass sophisticated,
global traffic management and high availability, without down
time or extensive upgrades.
-- Dynamic persistence keeps shopping carts full until checkout
-- 3-DNS allows network managers to re-evaluate and
re-establish persistence based on dynamic network conditions.
This enables greater control over persistence in distributed
sites, and is essential for applications requiring users to
return to the same device to complete their e-commerce
transactions. (The dynamic persistence feature requires use of
BIG-IP at each of the distributed data centers.)
-- Choice of management interface -- Users of 3-DNS can choose
between a browser-based GUI or a Command Line Interface (CLI).
This unique feature provides Network Managers with the option
of using the interface of their choice in configuring 3-DNS to
meet their specific business requirements.
-- New streamlined 2U profile -- The increased speed,
performance, and functionality of 3-DNS Controller are all
packaged in the new streamlined 2U configuration that uses
half the rack space as the previous 4U configuration.
About F5 Networks
F5 Networks is the leader in Internet Traffic and Content Management (iTCM). Our
award winning integrated suite of high-performance best of breed products
provide an end-to-end solution for automatically and intelligently managing
Internet content and traffic -- globally. Our products remove bandwidth
congestion and optimize the availability and speed of mission-critical Internet
servers and applications, including web publishing, content delivery,
e-commerce, caching, firewalls and more. 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 e-Business infrastructure. Our products are
widely deployed in large enterprises, the top service providers, financial
institutions, government agencies, healthcare, and portals throughout the world.
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, Germany, Singapore,
Sweden and the United Kingdom. F5 Networks is located on the web at www.f5.com.
F5 Networks (Nasdaq: FFIV) Internet Traffic Management products support a wide
range of operating systems and hardware platforms including those from: DELL
Computer (Nasdaq: DELL), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), Hewlett Packard
(NYSE:HWP), Compaq (NYSE:CPQ), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), IBM
(NYSE:IBM) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC). 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), BAAN
(Nasdaq: BAANF), Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), and PeopleSoft
(Nasdaq: PSFT).
This press release may contain forward looking statements relating to future
events or future financial performance that involve risks and uncertainties.
Such statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will,"
"should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates,"
"predicts", "potential" or "continue" or the negative of such terms or
comparable terms. These statements are only predictions and actual results could
differ materially from those anticipated in these statements based upon a number
of factors including those identified in the Company's filings with the SEC. |
