F5 Optimizes Microsoft Solutions Enabling The Dynamic Data Center

SEATTLE. F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced enhanced application delivery capabilities to help Microsoft customers implement dynamic infrastructures that can quickly respond to changing business needs and variables. With F5 solutions optimized to work with Microsoft technologies, customers gain strategic points of control throughout the infrastructure, giving IT the ability to access and allocate resources on demand. Specifically, F5 is announcing the advantages of deploying the F5 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager and the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition in concert with Microsoft products, in addition to expanded partnership efforts.

Virtualized environments require sophisticated tools to help IT provision and unify computing, network, and storage resources for maximum utilization and efficiency. F5's solution portfolio promotes seamless application delivery for virtualization and cloud deployments running on Microsoft platforms. In addition, F5 solutions provide enhanced visibility into application delivery environments so that IT resources can be tailored to meet an organization's business objectives while supporting users with optimized services.

"Customers looking to deploy Microsoft's on-premise cloud and virtualization solutions will find F5 solutions to be a powerful complement for the enhanced application delivery, infrastructure visibility, and automation capabilities they provide," said Dai Vu, Director of Virtualization Solutions Marketing at Microsoft Corp. "F5 shares our vision for the dynamic data center, and joint customers looking to deploy solutions in a number of distinct physical, virtual, and hybrid computing models will see added value."
To support Microsoft's vision for dynamic infrastructure with flexible deployment options and simplified management, F5 delivers:
    * Increased Support for Virtualization and Cloud Architecture Models: F5 offers a solution portfolio with both physical and virtual deployment options, providing comprehensive integration with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and more. With F5's BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition, customers can conveniently scale their data center environments without incurring the added cost and time associated with deploying traditional hardware. This flexibility gives customers options for supporting Microsoft applications within a variety of data center architecture models, including those leveraging cloud computing.
    * Enhanced Efforts with Microsoft to Benefit Joint Customers: F5 has joined the Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Alliance to further its commitment to providing joint customers with the IT agility they need to support their organizations and maximize the value of their technology investments. Recently, Microsoft announced that it would open its Dynamic Datacenter Alliance to technology partners, including the company's compute, network, and storage partners. F5 is the first ADN partner in this alliance and one of the "founding" network partners. Through this alliance and other partnership efforts, F5 plans to further work with Microsoft on solutions that promote the companies' shared vision of dynamic IT infrastructure.
    * Improved Infrastructure Manageability and Visibility for Microsoft Solutions: Integration with Microsoft's new Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit reduces the time required to deploy new virtual machines, and simplifies integral functionality such as virtual application provisioning, reconfiguration of network traffic, and holistic health monitoring. Tight integration between F5 BIG-IP solutions and Microsoft products enables the F5 Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and other F5 technologies to provide a unified view across Microsoft application environments.

For example, SharePoint--which operates as a composite of multiple application services, including core Windows Services, IIS, and Microsoft SQL--can now benefit from network visibility down to the component level. This provides IT departments with deep visibility into all the complementary technologies that SharePoint requires. Additionally, flexible F5 solutions--like the iControl API and iRules programming language--enable administrators to customize alert thresholds, reporting parameters, and resource provisioning. F5 is the only vendor providing comprehensive functionality, visibility, and management capabilities to this level of granularity.

"Our partnership with Microsoft continues delivering value for joint customers," said Calvin Rowland, VP of Application Partner Programs at F5. "Through collaborative interoperability and integration efforts, we're enhancing organizations' abilities to control and manage dynamic IT services. Real-time visibility into the status of computing, network, storage, and software application services allows organizations to make more effective, timely, and intelligent decisions regarding resource utilization and provisioning. The joint solutions stemming from this partnership enable customers to more readily harness the power of On-Demand IT."