F5 And VMware Solution Enables Cloud Connection For Live Application Mobility

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--F5 Networks, Inc. the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced that it will be demonstrating a breakthrough solution that affords businesses seamless flexibility in leveraging both public and private clouds. During VMworld 2009, F5 will demonstrate how it is possible to perform a secure migration of a live virtualized application, and its associated storage, to and from the cloud with no downtime or user disruption. This solution leverages F5 and VMware products available today.

"Enterprises and service providers are increasingly building their cloud infrastructures on the VMware vSphere 4 virtualization platform," said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware. "This solution from F5 demonstrates the combined ability of VMware and F5 products to provide seamless, automated connectivity to the cloud today. This joint solution extends the power of virtualization to VMware vSphere 4 instances in the cloud and illustrates a clear path to realizing the promise of unfettered computing mobility for production applications leading to most efficient use of available resources."

An agile Application Delivery Network is the fundamental component required to extend virtualization beyond a single data center or VMware vSphere 4 instance. This integration uses F5's BIG-IP solutions with VMware vSphere 4, VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, and the VMware vCenter APIs to overcome many of the networking hurdles that previously prevented organizations from migrating live applications to and from the cloud. The integration between VMware vCenter Server, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, and BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager simplifies global traffic management to enable easier live migrations. The solution also takes advantage of BIG-IP WAN application delivery services to accelerate VMware VMotion and VMware Storage VMotion events over links that are limited by bandwidth, latency, or packet-loss.

Prior to this solution, virtual applications needed to be cloned or suspended and redeployed separately in the cloud. Neither live virtual applications nor their storage could be migrated to the cloud. This integrated solution enables organizations to fully take advantage of the cost savings of the cloud model, while avoiding the hassles and complexities of rerouting global traffic manually or having to terminate live applications in order to reroute traffic.

"F5 is helping make cloud computing a practical reality for organizations that are running mission-critical applications," said Erik Giesa, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing at F5. "This joint solution with VMware enables access to cloud resources without manual intervention from IT. The power of VMware vSphere 4 combined with the networking flexibility of BIG-IP solutions significantly reduces the hurdles to cloud computing, and we look forward to continued collaboration with VMware to further unlock the cloud's potential."