F5 brought sexy back; at least to networking
Over the years I‘ve dealt with a number of technologies and expensive devices that do funny things with network traffic. None of them really made me smile; you know what I mean if you’ve ever tried to read a book titled “Telecommunication Traffic Engineering with Multi-Protocol Label Switching”. The world of networking and telecommunications was in my opinion the driest ever after you get past the basics, and even that’s questionable for some.
To get to my point, I’ve done quite a bit of work in the world of web operations and in doing so I ran into these strange “application-aware network devices” called load balancers. At this point I had the googly eyes and was interested. How could it be; a network device that actually cares what’s flowing through it. Anyway, I’ve had the chance to work with a few major appliances: Cisco’s LocalDirector and Content Switching Module, Nortel’s Alteon 180e and F5’s Local Traffic Manager. Now at one point I was a big Cisco buff and enjoyed the mystique of operating in the IOS, I felt almost as elite as when I worked on UNIX, I carried my laptop and console cable like an exhibition of coolness. In the world of web ops you live in a world where precise application upgrades are crucial and downtime is sometimes not an option. In that world, hopping on a network device and issuing some cryptic commands to pull servers out of the web farm is not as elegant as one would like. Enter F5’s BIG-IP and its iControl SDK.
With iControl you can now use SOAP/XML calls to control your F5 device. This means that now you can do some integration and have self-aware applications that can add and remove servers from the farm based on performance. Now that’s sexy! The other heavy hitters came along with similar solutions but in my opinion F5 had a leg up. F5 also has some other appliances that I think are really interesting and seem to be best in class, like the 3DNS product (I guess now it’s called Global Traffic Manager) and the WebAccelerator.
