F5 Hits Accelerator

A little less than a year after buying Swan Labs for $43 million, F5 Networks has managed to integrate that startup's gear with its own in a package that could give corporate Web portals a sizeable performance boost.

On Monday, F5 will unveil the WebAccelerator 4500, a new appliance that combines features of F5's WANjet WAN accelerator with the application-specific optimization of the WebAccelerator appliance that came from Swan Labs. (See F5 Snaps Up Swan Labs.)

Among the applications supported by the WebAccelerator 4500 are ones from IBM, Hyperion, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Siebel. F5 has added a "policy menu" interface for these application templates that gives the user a choice of what to optimize. Users can add their own optimization programs to the menu as well.

The resulting package should prove attractive to customers who have liked F5's products up to now and would like to see some of them combined and enhanced. At least one customer, for instance, says he's already improved performance considerably on his Web portal and looks forward to the convenience of the new templates.

"For our primary field users, mostly [airplane] pilots, we've seen performance improvement of 500 percent on the initial download, and up to 1,200 percent on subsequent downloads with caching," says Chad Jackson, portal manager at NetJets Inc., an air transportation and logistics company.Jackson says his firm picked Swan Labs' product a couple of years ago, after comparing it with what was then Fineground (now Cisco), Redline Networks (now Juniper), and the Actona product then offered by Cisco. (See Cisco Chomps FineGround.) What distinguished Swan Labs then, he says, was that it offered a combination of optimization features, instead of specializing in only one feature, such as compression or WAN optimization. "They had a very holistic approach, I thought," Jackson says.

Another key feature Jackson liked was Swan Labs' ability to give portal users access to a PDF file page without downloading the whole file. WebAccelerator, he notes, "can jump to page 100. It knows what to load first."

F5 also has released a new hardware platform for its Enterprise Manager, which has been revamped to centrally manage and configure up to 300 distinct WebAccelerator or F5 Big-IP upper-layer switches with new WebAccelerator modules.

At least one analyst thinks this management interface helps distinguish F5 from its competitors, including Cisco. "[F5] are the only ones that control the performance of applications from one place," says Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group. He's also impressed, he says, with how quickly F5 managed to integrate Swan Labs' technology.

Customers interested in F5's new gear had better be ready to pay: The WebAccelerator 4500 starts at $59,995, and the Enterprise Manager at $49,995.Nonetheless, if other customers can realize the kind of performance improvements Jackson claims, those sorts of costs may be easy to justify.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch