Why F5's iSeries is a Big Deal

When F5 introduced a new platform of appliances called iSeries, they immediately saw demand. F5 reported that iSeries bookings during 2016 Q4 represented about 18 percent of appliance bookings and believes the percentage will increase during going forward.

Based on interest from our customers, I'd say they are right. Since the launch of iSeries, we've conducted many workshops with customers looking to incorporate iSeries into their infrastructure and especially from those with legacy disperse physical appliances needing the ability to consolidate.

What we find is that customers are drawn to iSeries for three main reasons.

Encryption overload: ECC in hardware

The majority of today's internet traffic is encrypted and the percentage of encrypted traffic continues to grow. Also growing are major concerns about privacy. Now, very complex encryption techniques for internet traffic are standard, most notably Elliptical Curve Cryptography, ECC for short. ECC is generally the preferred encryption cipher for modern browsers. Although it provides needed security, it degrades performance of application delivery controllers when run in software.

F5's iSeries solves for this. It is the only application delivery controller that supports ECC in hardware. The iSeries i10800 will scale to 48,000 ECC transactions per second. This means applications can scale like never before using the latest ECC encryption techniques to ensure traffic is protected.

Increase application services: More concurrent module support

Before iSeries, if organization's wanted to run multiple modules, like LTM, ASM, APM and AVR, they needed to buy larger F5 appliances. With the iSeries platform, F5 has greatly increased memory, so multiple modules can run on even the smallest appliance. This allows for greater flexibility to deploy additional services in the future as well as drastically cutting cost by not over purchasing. For instance, with iSeries customers have the ability to provide web application firewalling, detailed analytics and federated application access to their applications on the smallest iSeries i2800.

Head in the clouds: New cloud functionality

Nearly everyone is involved with some aspect of cloud. Many have multiple clouds and it is a challenge to deliver applications the same way as a traditional on premise solution. No matter if it is public, private or hybrid cloud architecture, businesses need to provide consistent application services and security. The iSeries Application Connecter solution, which we expect to see later this year, allows you to seamlessly connect, discover applications and configure consistent services across multiple major cloud providers. The current cloud provider application services lack the required security capabilities, advanced traffic steering and performance needed to for today's applications.

We're continuing to explore the use cases of iSeries with our customers and will share our learnings as more organizations look to iSeries to deliver applications in a more automated, secure and agile fashion.

Also, if you need help making deployment decisions for code upgrades, consolidation, automation and migration to the iSeries platform, please reach out. Our experts will schedule a meeting to understand your current environment and architectural requirements. Or email mark.wall@wwt.com.