F5 Networks
F5 Networks is the leader in Internet Traffic and Content Management (iTCM). Our award winning integrated suite of high-performance, products provide an end-to-end solution for automatically and intelligently managing Internet content and traffic - globally.
Our products remove bandwidth congestion and optimize the availability and speed of mission-critical Internet servers and applications, including web publishing, content delivery, e-commerce, caching, firewalls and more. Our products are widely deployed in large enterprises, the top service providers, financial institutions, government agencies, healthcare organizations and portals throughout the world.
Businesses want - and need - control over their web sites. Revenue and profitability depend on being able to control web site availability and performance. But while we've come to expect a certain Quality of Service (QoS) from services such as the telephone and power, no such standard exists for web sites.
Not only is QoS required for networks, but also control over the resources (servers, networks, and content) that ultimately deliver the QoS users expect. Additionally, you need the tools to manage these resources in order to enforce your company's Internet policies. That's where F5 Networks, Inc. comes in. As pioneers in the field of high availability and Internet traffic/content management, F5 develops turnkey solutions that increase the availability and performance of Internet Protocol (IP)-based servers and network devices such as firewalls, routers, cache servers, proxy servers, and more.
Our products act like air traffic controllers, routing client requests to the most available server and directing requests away from downed servers - or servers that are not responding accurately.
Founded in 1996, F5 has grown to more than 475 employees and boasts an impressive list of more than 2500 of the top corporations including USA Today, Microsoft and Walmart.
Market: Never has a new medium gained acceptance as fast as the Internet. From a virtual standing start in 1994, the net now boasts well over 100 million users. Compare this with television (20 years to reach 100 million users) and the Fax (10 years to reach 100 million users). The net is straining under this load, and corporations are struggling to build high-availability, business-critical applications.
All of this is driving the market for Internet Traffic and Content Management, according to Internet Research Group. This market - products that help provide high performance, high-availability, scalable access to servers - is projected to grow in excess of 65% annually through the year 2002.
Internet Quality Control: Businesses need control over the availability and performance of their web sites. Is the web site available and working properly and can the web server respond to ever increasing customer demands? The level of control a company has over their web site is called Internet Quality Control.
When F5 first started, we talked with dozens of companies and developed a model showing how different types of companies define Internet Quality Control. For example, while all web sites care about availability, e-commerce sites have the greatest need. Similarly, multimedia sites and mega-websites have the greatest performance demands. F5 saw early on that it was not enough to focus on just one attribute - availability or performance. The majority of companies F5 spoke with said they needed both.
Based on this insight, F5 developed the first true high-availability load-balancing product line. Looking at some of the most successful web sites today, it is clear that this vision was correct.
Successful web sites are those that address all elements of Internet Quality Control, including high availability, high performance, intelligent load balancing, fault tolerance, security, manageability, and global data management.
Products and Services: Anyone who has ever been stuck in a holding pattern waiting to land understands the needs that drive F5's product line. Just as air traffic controllers manage air traffic, F5 manages IP traffic and content flow.
F5 has five core products: the BIG-IP® Controller, 3-DNS® Controller, GLOBAL-SITETM Controller, EDGE-FXTM Cache, and the SEE-ITTM Network Manager. All five help manage traffic and content to servers and devices in a way that maximizes availability and throughput.
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