F5 BIG-IP is now VCE Vblock ready certified: How can your Applications take advantage ?
Does your IT constantly demand ways to cost efficiently scale their infrastructure? Do you like to accelerate application deployment by leveraging a converged infrastructure environment that manages pools of network, storage and compute resources pre-configured and pre-validated into a technology stack ? Then here’s a great news for you… F5 BIG-IP Platform is now VCE Vblock ready certified! Certification demonstrates successful integration of F5 BIG-IP and VCE Vblock platform with an operationally clean, running Vblock producing no errors or performance degradations. This is a significant milestone that unlocks big benefits and delivers transformative data center solutions to customers of both F5 and VCE. So why should a Vblock Ready certification matter ? Imagine a healthcare organization that is unable to access electronic medical records because its data center is facing a brief outage. Think of an automated manufacturing environment wherein supervisors are unable to act on an assembly line error due to a hosted desktop application outage. These IT professionals place the most emphasis for application availability and immediate accessibility even in the event of a data center site outage. F5 Application Delivery Controillers (ADCs) not only provide standard load balancing but also offer high availability and mobility between data centers built on Vblock infrastructure. Customers will now be able to interoperate BIG-IP Application delivery controllers with Vblock systems. Channel partners can confidently combine F5 and Vblock solutions, which have been integrated and validated, for data center and cloud deployments alike. What exactly has been tested with this certification? BIG-IP compatibility with the Vblock infrastructure has been certified by Superna, a third party provider of certification services which help independent hardware vendors (IHVs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) develop data center solutions for VCE, EMC, VMware, HP, Brocade and Qlogic technologies. Both form factors (hardware and virtual) of BIG-IP have been tested with software versions 11.5.x for compatibility with the Vblock. Several major tests have been performed on both F5 and VCE infrastructure during the certification process including but not limited to F5 – Viprion and BIG-IP · Power failure test · Load Balancing and failover · Service forwarding and statistics · Access control and firewall logging · Config Backup · Config restore VCE ISV · Installation, Provisioning, Removal · Vendor appliance Live storage migration · Vendor Appliance Live Migration (vMotion) · Graceful Software restart · Forced software restart In all of the above, application functionality and test cases have been validated and completed without any errors. Leverage the certification as a building block to expand your possibilities F5 can fit both within and between data centers built on Vblock infrastructures in order to ensure application availability and can help load balance users among multiple Vblock based data centers. Further, the Big-IP platform has the capability to generate necessary configurations using iApps based on the deployment scenario using iApps. So, take advantage of this certification and start leveraging the capabilities F5 can give for your Vblock environment.
