on 04-Apr-2014 07:00
#F5 #virtualization #SDAS #webperf
You've all heard the news, right? Load balancers are dead. But that doesn't mean load balancing is dead and, in fact, it's a pretty critical piece of today's emerging technologies. That's because when you look out at what's going on and what's growing like weeds in a Midwest corn field, it's applications. Applications need load balancing to scale because at some point, operational axioms start proving themselves true and load on an individual application causes performance to plummet - or worse.
Scale is an integral piece of the puzzle, and it's driving a number of technological changes today including SDN (scaling networks) and Cloud (scaling applications).
Coupled with these external pressures are those coming from within application development proper; the architecture of applications is changing, forced by the mounting pressure from business and consumers to deliver faster, more efficiently and more frequently. Both devops and traditional network operations are feeling the pinch, and that means shaking things up when it comes to designing enterprise network architectures capable of keeping up with the tectonic shifts that threaten to squeeze the network in between them.
That's why it's important to be able to support both core and application networks with a variety of options. Options that include virtualized network elements capable of supporting with alacrity architectures such as SDN, cloud and devops-inspired patterns like canary deployments. .
BIG-IP LTM VE is the core of application delivery (which, if you recall, is how load balancing is delivered these days - as an integral service of a more comprehensive approach to application delivery) and you can download and try it out for free for 90 days at http://f5.com/trials.
This 90-day free trial gives you the ability to run BIG-IP LTM and 10 concurrent BIG-IP Access Policy Manager user sessions with your network applications in a pre-production environment to test configurations. When you are ready to use BIG-IP in production, back up your configuration and restore it to a production BIG-IP device to experience the ultimate in flexibility.
The BIG-IP LTM VE free trial (for a VMware hypervisor environment) allows you to try out such functionality as:
F5 is pleased to announce three different ways you can try out BIG-IP LTM VE:
A free 90-day download is available at http://f5.com/trials
If you need more features or want to try the latest version, just contact F5 to get free full-featured 30-day evaluation licenses of any BIG-IP solution.
If you need build, test, and configure BIG-IP in your dev lab, we have low-cost BIG-IP Lab licenses available for a nominal fee. Just contact F5 to get started.
Need more information before you download? No problem, you can check out the BIG-IP LTM VE data sheet right here [pdf].