Solution Brief: F5 Application ... - Big Switch...
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Leverage the benefits of F5’s industryleading BIGIP deployed with Big Switch’s SDN powered Big Cloud Fabric to deliver optimal performance and elasticity for cloudscale applications hosted across both physical and virtual infrastructure. THE CHALLENGE Modern applications demand a network infrastructure that is agile, automated and easy to manage, while reducing overall costs. These applications are increasingly dynamic with virtual machine (VM) workloads moving within and occasionally across data centers. To ensure quick deployment of new applications and manage existing ones, IT organizations have to rearchitect the underlying infrastructure so that it is automated and scalable, and delivers dynamic and consistent ondemand services in a shared, multitenant environment. With virtualization of applications, 70% of total data center traffic is now serverserver (eastwest) traffic as opposed to what has been traditionally, clientserver (northsouth) traffic. East west traffic is driving requirements for newer network designs with predictable latency and high performance at the servernetwork edge. As networks scale, it is critical that application delivery services scale proportionally across both physical and virtual workloads to ensure optimal performance, agility and easeofdeployment of applications, while providing an attractive total cost of ownership (TCO). THE SOLUTION F5 Networks and Big Switch Networks are partnering to bring the industryleading F5 BIGIP loadbalancer to Big Switch’s SDNbased Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) built with bare metal switches. The joint solution enables appcentric network designs that offer application elasticity, improved application performance, and ease of application provisioning. The podbased deployment model allows modern hyperscalestyle network designs to be seamlessly inserted in existing data centers while significantly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). Customers gain flexibility and ease of deployment of F5 load balancing to dramatically improve server utilization and application performance and leverage the benefits of operational simplification and costoptimization of an SDNpowered scaleout fabric solution. THE SOLUTION COMPONENTS F5 BIGIP Local Traffic Manager F5’s BIGIP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) increases operational efficiency and ensures peak network performance by providing a flexible, highperformance application delivery system. With its applicationcentric perspective, BIGIP LTM optimizes the network infrastructure to deliver availability and performance for critical business applications. Using realtime protocol and traffic management decisions based on application and server conditions, extensive connection management, TCP and content offloading, BIG IP LTM dramatically improves page load times and the user experience with HTTP 2.0 and SPDY. Optional addon modules offer further performance gains. With F5 ScaleN technology that delivers ondemand scaling capabilities, LTM is architected to adapt to shifting performance and application needs. By including powerful F5 iApps, LTM enables management of application services, providing greater visibility and control over application delivery. The Big Cloud Fabric The BCF embraces the following hyperscale design principles to enable rapid innovation, operational simplicity with TCO reduction. • Bare Metal Hardware: The BCF is built with bare metal hardware, disaggregating hardware from software and providing flexibility, vendor choice and significant cost advantage. • Hierarchical Control Plane: The control plane is an externalized SDN controller with few key functions offloaded to switches for scale and resiliency. This “hierarchical” implementation drives a new level of agility, not achieved with legacy networking. • CoreandPod Design: Each BCF network is deployed as a pod, connected to an existing core. This architecture simplifies automation, capacity planning, and enables rapid deployment of new technologies. Customers are deploying BCF pods for variety of use cases, including private cloud, Big Data analytics and virtual desktop infra (VDI). F5 Application Delivery Controller with Big Cloud Fabric Two Line Title
Transcript of Solution Brief: F5 Application ... - Big Switch...
Leverage the benefits of F5’s industry-‐leading BIG-‐IP deployed with Big Switch’s SDN-‐powered Big Cloud Fabric to deliver optimal performance and elasticity for cloud-‐scale applications hosted across both physical and virtual infrastructure. advanced L4-‐L7 tenant services based on A10 aCloud Services Architecture, in combination with Big Switch’s SDN-‐powered, cost-‐optimized BiFabric
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THE CHALLENGE Modern applications demand a network infrastructure that is agile, automated and easy to manage, while reducing overall costs. These applications are increasingly dynamic with virtual machine (VM) workloads moving within and occasionally across data centers. To ensure quick deployment of new applications and manage existing ones, IT organizations have to re-‐architect the underlying infrastructure so that it is automated and scalable, and delivers dynamic and consistent on-‐demand services in a shared, multi-‐tenant environment. With virtualization of applications, 70% of total data center traffic is now server-‐server (east-‐west) traffic as opposed to what has been traditionally, client-‐server (north-‐south) traffic. East-‐west traffic is driving requirements for newer network designs with predictable latency and high performance at the server-‐network edge. As networks scale, it is critical that application delivery services scale proportionally across both physical and virtual workloads to ensure optimal performance, agility and ease-‐of-‐deployment of applications, while providing an attractive total cost of ownership (TCO).
THE SOLUTION F5 Networks and Big Switch Networks are partnering to bring the industry-‐leading F5 BIG-‐IP load-‐balancer to Big Switch’s SDN-‐based Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) built with bare metal switches. The joint solution enables app-‐centric network designs that offer application elasticity, improved application performance, and ease of application provisioning. The pod-‐based deployment model allows modern hyperscale-‐style network designs to be seamlessly inserted in existing data centers while significantly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). Customers gain flexibility and ease of deployment of F5 load balancing to dramatically improve server utilization and application performance and leverage the benefits of operational simplification and cost-‐optimization of an SDN-‐powered scale-‐out fabric solution.
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THE SOLUTION COMPONENTS F5 BIG-‐IP Local Traffic Manager F5’s BIG-‐IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) increases operational efficiency and ensures peak network performance by providing a flexible, high-‐performance application delivery system. With its application-‐centric perspective, BIG-‐IP LTM optimizes the network infrastructure to deliver availability and performance for critical business applications. Using real-‐time protocol and traffic management decisions based on application and server conditions, extensive connection management, TCP and content offloading, BIG-‐IP LTM dramatically improves page load times and the user experience with HTTP 2.0 and SPDY. Optional add-‐on modules offer further performance gains. With F5 ScaleN technology that delivers on-‐demand scaling capabilities, LTM is architected to adapt to shifting performance and application needs. By including powerful F5 iApps, LTM enables management of application services, providing greater visibility and control over application delivery.
The Big Cloud Fabric The BCF embraces the following hyperscale design principles to enable rapid innovation, operational simplicity with TCO reduction. • Bare Metal Hardware: The BCF is built with bare metal
hardware, disaggregating hardware from software and providing flexibility, vendor choice and significant cost advantage.
• Hierarchical Control Plane: The control plane is an externalized SDN controller with few key functions off-‐loaded to switches for scale and resiliency. This “hierarchical” implementation drives a new level of agility, not achieved with legacy networking.
• Core-‐and-‐Pod Design: Each BCF network is deployed as a pod, connected to an existing core. This architecture simplifies automation, capacity planning, and enables rapid deployment of new technologies.
Customers are deploying BCF pods for variety of use cases, including private cloud, Big Data analytics and virtual desktop infra (VDI).
F5 Application Delivery Controller with Big Cloud Fabric Two Line Title
Copyright 2014 Big Switch Networks, inc. All rights reserved. Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Tap, Switch light oS, and Switch light vSwitch are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.Big Switch Net- works assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document. Big Switch Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer or otherwise revise this publication without notice. BCF F5 At a glance V1 March 2015.
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HOW THE SOLUTION WORKS The F5 BIG-‐IP can be deployed either as a physical appliance or as a virtual appliance within the Big Cloud Fabric. It can be inserted into the fabric either as a dedicated service or as a part of the service chain (see Figure 1). The BCF supports a multi-‐tenant architecture with the ability to create logical tenants that can span multiple physical racks. As part of this logical architecture, the ADC can be configured to load balance either client-‐server (north-‐south) traffic coming into the BCF or server-‐server (east-‐west) traffic within the BCF. Physically, the F5 BIG-‐IP can be attached to any of the leaf switches in the fabric.
KEY SOLUTION BENEFITS Cloud/network administrators can ensure reliable application performance for the workloads by deploying F5’s BIG-‐IP in conjunction with the BCF. This enables the user to achieve the following benefits:
• Application-‐Oriented Control: The multi-‐tenant design of the BCF enables each tenant to have administrative control over logical L2/L3/policy design. The BCF controller has the intelligence to optimally translate the application-‐centric logical network design into forwarding tables entries of the physical and virtual switches in the fabric. Inserting BIG-‐IP’s L4-‐L7 services into the BCF fabric enables intelligent management of application services by providing control over application delivery based on L4-‐L7 content.
• Rapid Application Agility: The BCF brings agility by leveraging centralized programmability and automation for rapid provisioning of applications. Combined with Big-‐IPs ability to configure centralized application services and the ability to move application policies along with workload movement, the joint solution provides agility, greater visibility and control over application delivery.
• Massive Operational Simplification and Scale: The BCF brings tremendous simplification to fabric-‐wide operations – zero touch installation of OS on fabric switches, automated fabric bring up,
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centralized configuration of tenants & logical routers/segments, fabric-‐wide rapid upgrade and seamless insertion of L4-‐L7 services such as F5’s BIG-‐IP. The operational simplicity of the solution along with the absence of complex networking protocols for centralized forwarding logic enables seamless scale-‐out of spine and leaf switches in the BCF.
• Scale-‐Out Resilience: The operational simplicity of the BCF combined with the centralized forwarding logic enables seamless scale out of the topology with automatic insertion of additional spine and leaf switches into the fabric. Redundancy and resilience is built into the fabric with an active-‐standby controller and redundant leaf and spine design. BIG-‐IP provides on-‐demand scaling capabilities through the underlying ScaleN technology. Application service clustering enables application-‐ and service-‐level control and failover to deliver industry-‐leading availability and a reliable user experience.
In summary, the combination of F5’s state-‐of-‐the-‐art BIG-‐IP Local Traffic Manager and the Big Cloud Fabric delivers a cost-‐optimized, application-‐oriented cloud fabric solution with unmatched resilience, scale and operational simplicity. The solution uniquely leverages application-‐specific policies, and SDN-‐based fabrics built with bare-‐metal switches for supporting modern applications on cloud infrastructure.
ABOUT F5 NETWORKS F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking with a mission of delivering the most secure, fast, and reliable applications to anyone, anywhere at anytime. F5 helps organizations meet the demands and embrace the opportunities that come with the relentless growth of voice, data, and video traffic, mobile workers, and applications -‐ in the data center, the network, and the cloud. The world’s largest businesses, service providers, government entities, and consumer brands rely on F5’s intelligent services framework to deliver and protect their applications and services while ensuring people stay connected. Learn more at http://www.f5.com
Figure 1: F5-‐BIG IP deployed along with the Big Cloud Fabric
