F5 appliances can give you lots of flexibility at the application level. The iRules featureset allows you to re-write web content on the fly, which can be useful to work around temporary problems. This feature can make turning a CDN on/off at short notice a breeze. Another possible use for this is for compliance (example: you can define a regex to obscure credit card numbers being sent to the client, in case your app doesn't). There is some performance penalty for these features.
Also, the BigIP platform is basically Linux under the hood, with special ASIC-based switching hardware. You get root access, and can troubleshoot using tcpdump, grep logfiles, run cron jobs etc, and edit config files for the application modules within the system. If you need to integrate it into an automated provisioning system this makes things pretty simple. Also if you're delegating responsibility for pools / vips to another team the GUI is friendly enough to get on with. One thing to check is the pricing. Various application modules have different licenses and the pricing depends on the specification of unit you run it on. If you're going for pure performance, and don't need the additional features or management flexibility the F5 can offer, then you may find the Foundry equipment offers better value. On 09/02/2008, Paul Raj Khangure <foundry-nsp at digitaljunkie.net> wrote: > I was wondering if anyone had any F5 experience and could give a rough > overview of comparitive advantages / disadvantages, or point me in a > general direction of where to concentrate on evaluation. > > prk > _______________________________________________ > foundry-nsp mailing list > foundry-nsp at puck.nether.net > http://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/foundry-nsp >
