Infrastructure Product of the Year: F5 Networks' Big-IP 5000
Nothing gets us more excited than a sexy piece of networking equipment. This past year, F5 Networks' Big-IP 5000 gave us plenty of palpitations. F5, best known for its content-switching and global server load-balancing appliances, introduced the Big-IP 5000, which offers both Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching and Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing in a single, port-dense device. As if that weren't enough, version 4.0 also handles encryption: The integration of a Broadcom cryptographic accelerator ensures that even SSL-encrypted packets would be examined, enabling customers to take advantage of the Big-IP's content-based traffic-direction capabilities. Featuring 24 ports of 10/100 Fast Ethernet and four ports of Gigabit Ethernet, coupled with plenty of processing power and memory for load balancing, the Big-IP 5000 is an exciting yet elegant networking device full of raw power and speed. The redesigned Web management GUI provides an even more intuitive and easy-to-use interface for managing Layer 7 rules, not only for load-balancing decisions but for any IP traffic.
F5 Networks' Big-IP 5000 IP application switch was the icing on the cake for F5 Networks this year. By building a switch fabric from the ground up, F5 was able to hook its Big-IP 4.0 load balancing software into the core of the switch and provide super-fast switching, routing and load-balancing decisions from Layer 2 to Layer 7.
Its 24 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, integrated SSL accelerator and most excellent Web-based management interface combine to give the Big-IP the features and functionality necessary to win the Well Connected Award in the Content Switch category.
We all want our Web sites to load faster, and content acceleration devices are the name of the game. Packeteer's AppCelera ICX-75s does just that, and then some. It's easy to deploy and manage, and it accelerates both secure and unsecure Web content. Packeteer's offering is also intelligent: it compresses content only when the latency required to do so would not actually increase the transfer time (such as on a LAN) and then caches the compressed content to save time serving the next request for that same content.
With its feature set and performance, Packeteer's AppCelera ICX-75s deserves its win in the content acceleration device category.
BGP isn't perfect, but there's no way to avoid it if you want multiple connections to the Internet. Protocols don't care about SLAs or expenses. But RouteScience's PathControl 1.1 does, and it enables users to make the most appropriate routing decisions based on business requirements such as cost.
PathControl monitors each of your links and can automatically change your preferred route based on numerous qualifiers, providing a better quality of service for your traffic. With its expandable, bladed purple chassis, the PathControl proved that it has the chops to not only tell BGP when it's wrong, but also correct the situation.
Load balancing is no longer simply the answer to scalability, reliability and performance issues. It's also becoming an important facet of the solution to personalization demands. Coyote Point's Emissary showed the industry how geo-targeting technology can be used to satisfy not only IT but business needs, as well, by pinpointing content based on the physical location of a customer -- all the way down to the city level.
While there are multiple GSLB (global server load balancing) solutions available, only Coyote Point, which teamed up with DigitalEnvoy, has created a GSLB solution that answers the need for both speed and personalized content. This makes Emissary our load-balancing solution of choice.
Linux is an enterprise player. Not only can it save you money, it can provide a stable, secure server environment for your apps. Of all the distributions that we looked at this year, we found SuSE to be the most comprehensive and the most stable. Not only that, with the powerful Yast2 configuration utility, you can avoid the pain of the CLI without sacrificing control. In addition, it was the only version that can create a crypto file system. Security updates are timely, and they could even be done with the GUI.
• Red Hat Linux 7.2, Red Hat, (888) 733-4281, (919) 547-0012. www.redhat.com
Web Server
WINNER: iPlanet Web Server Enterprise Edition 6.0, now known as Sune ONE Web Server - Enteprise Edition
While many may consider Web servers a commodity, as a market, these products continue to evolve. Witness the features available in the Sun ONE Web Server, Enterprise Edition, formerly known as the iPlanet Web Server Enterprise Edition 6.0: a J2EE-compliant container and a slick deployment model. Not only does iPlanet shine with its performance, it gets kudos for its ability to centrally manage multiple servers.
Sun ONE also earns points for its support of multiple development paradigms and native connectivity for popular RDBMS solutions. For true speed freaks, the Sun ONE Web Server's configuration could be tweaked easily from the interface to provide any necessary performance boost.
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