F5 Networks, Inc. is an American-based company that specializes in application delivery networking (ADN) technology for the delivery of web applications and the security, performance, availability of servers, data storage devices, and other network and cloud resources. F5 is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has other development, manufacturing, and sales/marketing offices.
Known originally for its load balancing product, today F5's product and services line has expanded into all things related to the delivery of applications, including local load balancing and acceleration, global (DNS based) load balancing and acceleration, security through web application firewall and application authentication and access products, DDoS defense, and more, both for the local datacenter and cloud.
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Corporate history
F5 Networks, originally named F5 Labs, was established in 1996. The company name was inspired by the 1996 movie Twister, in which reference was made to the fastest and most powerful tornado on the Fujita Scale: F5.
F5's first product (launched in 1997) was a load balancer called BIG-IP. When a server went down or became overloaded, BIG-IP directed traffic away from that server to other servers that could handle the load.
In June 1999, the company had its initial public offering and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange with symbol FFIV.
In 2010 and 2011, F5 Networks was on Fortune's list of 100 Fastest-Growing Companies. The company was also rated one of the top ten best-performing stocks by S&P 500 in 2010. F5 was also named a Best Place to Work by online jobs and recruiting site Glassdoor in 2015 and 2016.
Competitors included Cisco Systems (until 2012), Citrix Systems, and Radware.
François Locoh-Donou replaced John McAdam as president and CEO on April 3, 2017.
Acquisitions
- uRoam (SSL VPN vendor) for USD $25 million in 2003
- Magnifire WebSystems (web application firewall) for USD $29 million in 2004
- Swan Labs (WAN acceleration and web acceleration) for USD $43 million in 2005.
- Acopia Networks (file virtualization) for USD $210 million in 2007
- DPI intellectual property from Crescendo Networks in 2011 (amount undisclosed)
- Traffix Systems (Diameter protocol switching technology) in 2012 (amount undisclosed)
- LineRate Systems in 2013 (high-performance, software-based Load Balancer for x86 systems with node.js datapath scripting)
- Versafe (anti-fraud, anti-phishing, and anti-malware solutions) for USD $87.7 Million in 2013
- Defense.Net (cloud-based DDoS mitigation service) for USD $49.4 million in 2014
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Products
BIG-IP
F5's BIG-IP product family comprises hardware, modularized software, and virtual appliances that run the F5 TMOS operating system. Depending on the appliance selected, one or more BIG-IP product modules can be added. Acronyms used include:
- Local Traffic Manager (LTM): Local load balancing based on a full-proxy architecture.
- Application Security Manager (ASM): A web application firewall.
- Access Policy Manager (APM): Provides access control and authentication for HTTP and HTTPS applications.
- Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM): On-premises DDoS protection, data centre firewall.
- Application Acceleration Manager (AAM): Accelerates and optimizes application performance through technologies such as compression and caching.
- IP Intelligence (IPI): Blocking known bad IP addresses, prevention of phishing attacks and botnets.
- WebSafe: Protects against sophisticated fraud threats, leveraging advanced encryption, client-less malware detection and session behavioral analysis capabilities.
- BIG-IP DNS: Distributes DNS and application requests based user, network, and cloud performance conditions.
BIG-IP history
On September 7, 2004, F5 Networks released version 9.0 of the BIG-IP software in addition to appliances to run the software. Version 9.0 also marked the introduction of the company's TMOS architecture, with significant enhancements including:
- Moved from BSD to Linux to handle system management functions (disks, logging, bootup, console access, etc.)
- Creation of a Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) to directly talk to the networking hardware and handle all network activities.
- Creation of the standard full-proxy mode, which fully terminates network connections at the BIG-IP and establishes new connections between the BIG-IP and the member servers in a pool. This allows for optimum TCP stacks on both sides as well as the complete ability to modify traffic in either direction.
Subsequent releases enhanced performance, improves application security, and supported cloud application deployments.
BIG-IQ
F5 describes BIG-IQ as a framework for managing BIG-IP devices and application services, irrespective of their form factors (hardware, software or cloud) or deployment model (on-premises, private/public cloud or hybrid). BIG-IQ supports integration with other ecosystem participants such as public cloud providers, and orchestration engines through cloud connectors and through a set of open RESTful APIs. BIG-IQ uses a multi-tenant approach to management. This allows organizations to move closer to IT as a Service without concern that it might affect the stability or security of the services fabric.[24]
Herculon
Herculon is a product for security administrators. DDoS Hybrid Defender and SSL Orchestrator, were introduced in January 2017.
Silverline
Silverline is a cloud-based application service. Its offerings include security services such as WAF and DDoS protection services.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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