Located in the data center in front of servers, firewalls and gateways, BIG-IP allows organizations to extend traffic management to all of their IP-based applications. In this way, they can ensure quality of service and manageability, apply business policies and rules to content delivery, support increasing traffic volumes, deliver applications securely, increase operational efficiency and cost control, and remain flexible to future application and infrastructure changes to protect their investments.

Version 9 marked an overhaul of the BIG-IP product, including an OS rewrite, a new ASIC design, and new applications. With this step, F5 has moved beyond content switching and load balancing to wide-ranging application acceleration, and our judges were impressed. "Local Traffic Manager adds considerable new functionality to a product line that was already a best-in-class offering. This functionality helps maximize application server and network asset investment," said one judge.

Functionality, as we can see, is the key criteria here; our judges gave the product top scores in that category across the board. In addition to an operating system with heightened capabilities, the product includes client-aware HTTP compression, server optimization techniques such as content spooling, Layer 7 rate shaping, TCP multiplexing, IPv6 support, advanced authentication and authorization, application content filtering, packet filtering, resource cloaking, protocol sanitization, and DoS, DDoS and SYN flood protection.

The BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager 6400 Version 9 costs $34,995. According to the company, in most cases organizations realize ROI in less than one quarter after implementation.

Susan Fogarty