CS Cabletron PR today:
Monday May 10, 8:06 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
Cabletron and F5 Networks Sign OEM Agreement
Cabletron to Offer High-Availability Content Hosting by Bundling F5's Internet Traffic Management Products with SmartSwitch Router
LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 10, 1999-- Cabletron Systems (NYSE:CS - news) and F5 Networks, Inc., formerly F5 Labs, today announced that the companies have signed an OEM agreement, effective immediately. Cabletron will rebrand and resell F5's BIG/ip high-availability, intelligent load balancing product as part of its award-winning SmartSwitch Router (SSR) content hosting solution.
Cabletron will offer F5's BIG/ip product as a bundled solution with its SSR Family (8600, 8000 and 2000). The SSR, front-ended by F5's BIG/ip product, will be able to balance network loads across multiple servers, thereby providing higher availability and reliability to business-critical applications such as Internet/intranet applications and e-commerce traffic. The 10/100/1000 Mbps Layer 2, 3 and 4 switching inherent in Cabletron's SSR eliminates network bottlenecks by removing the delays associated with software-based routers. These solutions provide unparalleled benefits to customers that demand faster application response time, reduced server workload, lowered maintenance requirements and assurance of content availability.
''Cabletron's content hosting solution delivers value to service providers and enterprise customers alike by providing high-availability server load balancing, and by accelerating application response time. These solutions increase the performance, control and reliability of server clusters,'' said Andrew Feldman, Cabletron's senior director of solutions marketing.
Steve Goldman, vice president of sales and marketing at F5 Networks, concurred, ''We're delighted that Cabletron is bundling our BIG/ip product with their award-winning SSR Family to deliver a higher level of availability, security and quality of service (QoS) to customers.''
Cabletron's Content Hosting Solution
High-availability server load balancing is critical to content hosting, as Internet and intranet traffic, e-mail, streamed multimedia applications and other IP traffic converge and compete with each other for optimal bandwidth and server access. As Cabletron diversifies its product portfolio to meet the needs of the service provider marketplace, the company will emphasize value-added services, such as content hosting.
F5's BIG/ip product, when bundled with Cabletron's SSR, provides the most sophisticated, high-availability server load balancing solution in the industry. This solution will be targeted to service providers and Cabletron's existing enterprise customers who demand guaranteed access to their servers.
How The Solution Works
The Cabletron-rebranded BIG/ip product will work in conjunction with Cabletron's SSR, and will be situated between the router and the customer's server array. BIG/ip will act as an intelligent switch between the SSR and network servers, managing and distributing Internet and intranet user requests across a group of servers running common applications.
To the end user, the group of servers appears as one because BIG/ip continuously monitors the performance of each server, and automatically routes incoming requests to the server best able to handle it. This eliminates downtime users would normally experience when trying to access an unavailable server.
The SSR and BIG/ip content hosting solution will be demonstrated this week at Cabletron's N+I booth # 8153. F5 Networks is located in booth # 6401.
About F5 Networks
F5 Networks is a privately held software company funded, in part, by Menlo Ventures and IDG Ventures of Menlo Park and San Francisco, respectively. F5 Networks provides high availability and Quality Control for business-critical Internet sites. F5's mission is to provide the finest combined products and services to equip their customers with Quality Control of their servers, networks, content and network management. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., London, England and Munich, Germany. F5 is located on the web at f5.com.
About Cabletron Systems
Cabletron Systems, a premier provider of enterprise-class networking solutions, delivers dependable network access and communications to millions of people worldwide. With scaleable products designed for Fortune 1000 enterprise networks, service providers and small businesses, Cabletron is the e-business communications specialist for the information age. Cabletron's web site can be reached on the Internet at cabletron.com.
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Contact:
Cabletron Systems
Ann Kelly, 603/337-2588
akelly@cabletron.com
or
Ruder Finn
Nicole Peters, 212/593-6376
petersn@ruderfinn.com
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