F5 Networks Expands Appliances, Services and Network Design Options

F5 Networks Jason Needham, Director of Product Management and Satya Vardharajan, product Manager came to brief me on their new BIG-IP appliances, the Global Traffic Manager (GTM), the Link Controller and the 8400 Platform. We also discussed F5's Traffic Management Operating System or TM/OS which is the firm's product development platform for hardware and software development. I find two things different about F5. One is that their customers are both networking and datacenter executives which is unique to a company the size of F5. Second is their TM/OS architecture has allowed F5 to stack software features/services on top of their appliances pretty rapidly such as adding DNS support, distributed application management, intelligent session persistence et al on top of its industry hardened load balancing technology.