F5 introduces Synthesis architecture

F5 Networks, Inc. has launched the F5 Synthesis™ architectural vision, promoting the delivery and orchestration of software defined application services™ (SDAS™) throughout data center, cloud, and hybrid environments. Powered by an elastic, multi-tenant and high-performance services fabric, F5 Synthesis enables customers to rapidly and cost-effectively provision layer 4-7 services to anyone at any time without constraints.

The Synthesis architectural vision builds on signature F5® technologies like TMOS® and ScaleN™, adding new elements to extend the reach of intelligent application services further into IT infrastructures and cloud environments. As a culmination of F5 innovations to date, today’s announcement marks a significant step toward enabling customers to realize the goal of delivering a software defined data center with SDAS. SDAS complement existing layer 2-3 network and compute-focused efforts by filling the gap in support for critical layer 4-7 services. A comprehensive set of management and control plane APIs ensures integration and interoperability with SDN and virtualization systems, as well as in the cloud.

An all-active and multi-tenant application-driven services fabric enables a flexible model for provisioning and orchestrating services that can be extended from the data center to the cloud. Combined with new licensing options, F5 Synthesis reduces the costs of delivering services so customers can increase the value of a rich and extensible set of services for all devices, networks, and applications. In support of this vision, F5 is introducing a tiered licensing model to consolidate purchasing options for its solutions and significantly reduce customer costs when application services are deployed in concert versus individually. For additional information on F5’s new pricing options, please go to: http://www.f5.com/pdf/licensing/good-better-best-licensing-overview.pdf

F5’s high-performance services fabric scales to meet the needs of the most demanding environments. Deployed across hardware, software, or cloud infrastructures, the Synthesis ScaleN services fabric can support up to 1.28 million instances in a combination of administrative domains and virtual instances with a combined throughput of 20.5 TB and connection capacity of 9.2 billion—more than three times the capacity needed to manage a connection from every Internet user today across the globe.[1] A centralized management system enables the automated discovery, topology, and provisioning of service fabric instances, reducing the operational overhead associated with manual processes and enabling rapid provisioning and scale of the most comprehensive set of application services available today across device, network, and application domains. To realize the economy of scale required to enable a “no application left behind” strategy, automated provisioning and orchestration is a must. F5 Synthesis enables enterprises and service providers to seamlessly manage, scale, and automate application services with BIG-IQ™. Complementing the services fabric’s multi-tenancy is BIG-IQ’s multi-tenant approach to management, enabling organizations to move toward realizing IT as a Service (ITaaS) and the operational benefits of a software defined data center.

To further provide tangible context for customers on the company’s vision, F5 is also introducing a collection of reference architectures focused on business solutions designed to help organizations accelerate time to market and address some of IT’s most pervasive challenges. As an example, the company issued a separate press release today focused on helping organizations defend against DDoS attacks.

KEY BENEFITS

Improved Service Velocity – Business stakeholders today are highly sensitive to the time it takes to deliver new services and applications to the market. Trends and technologies such as agile, DevOps, cloud, and SDN have made great strides toward meeting service velocity requirements across development, operations, and networking teams but have not adequately addressed key layer 4-7 services. F5 Synthesis fills that gap with an open and extensible framework that allows a growing ecosystem of technology partners to collaborate on comprehensive, integrated provisioning and orchestration systems that address velocity requirements across compute, network, and application services.

F5 Synthesis reference architectures further accelerate time to market by enabling rapid service implementation for key security, cloud, and mobility challenges with detailed architectural and implementation guidance.

Reduced Costs and Complexity – Standardizing on an F5 service delivery platform significantly reduces operational risk and improves business continuity through comprehensive management capabilities. Within the Synthesis architectural framework, organizations can centrally deploy, manage, and orchestrate application service topologies in a consistent manner across data center and cloud environments. This results in predictable and repeatable application deployments, thereby reducing the number of manual configurations and subsequent errors, and instilling the confidence in automated deployments necessary to move forward with self-service initiatives that can further reduce operational costs.

Because the F5 platforms composing the services fabric can be deployed on the customer’s choice of F5 hardware, any of the most popular hypervisors, or in the cloud, customers can pursue virtualization and cloud initiatives such as software defined data centers without sacrificing the reach or effectiveness of vital application services, security capabilities, and network reliability.

Application-Driven Elasticity – F5 technologies (such as BIG-IP®, BIG-IQ, LineRate™, Traffix™ SDC™, and Versafe™) provide customers with a number of deployment options. F5’s physical, virtual, and cloud-based solutions provide a flexible, high-performance services fabric with core capabilities focused on application requirements for reliability and scale. F5 Synthesis enables customers to move from managing traditional reliability models to a strategic, service-based approach that focuses on application-level service provisioning, automation, and orchestration that better aligns application services with business and user expectations.

Cloud Enablement – Organizations looking to deploy applications in the cloud are often impeded by corporate requirements around security, compliance, and performance. In the Synthesis model, F5 application services can be deployed in cloud environments and managed centrally alongside services deployed in the data center, enabling consistent deployment and enforcement of the policies governing security and performance. This capability enables organizations to confidently take advantage of the benefits cloud has to offer.

Programmability to Better Meet Business Needs – F5 Synthesis directly enables service automation, supports emerging application and network architectures, and enables service creation through a policy-based, customizable approach. F5 customers can leverage powerful tools like iRules®, iControl®, iCall™, iApps®, Groovy, and Node.js to configure and programmatically adjust their environments dynamically, as well as extend the intelligence of business-focused decisions beyond existing service capabilities. Customers can create, deploy, modify, and extend services quickly to address variables impacting the security, reliability, and performance of applications and networks. With an emphasis on programmability and automation, F5 empowers organizations to align services with business and user needs.