F5 launches SDN-enabled network management suite

F5 has announced the launch of a suite of services designed to speed up the roll out of services and applications, leaning heavily on SDN.

The vendor announced a bulked up portfolio of offerings and platforms designed to provide visibility, reporting, licensing and management capabilities to enhance the operations of its existing BIG-IP product range. The upgrade, F5 claims, combines centralised, role-based management for application delivery, as well as security and identity management.

Building up the control of physical and virtual devices, F5 says customers can now simultaneously manage, update and configure application services.

Its new iWorkflow platform is an SDN-centric offering which harnesses the management and orchestration characteristics of software for network operations. It claims the solution can be rolled out as a virtual appliance and supports a variety of multi-tenant solutions and IT environments including hybrid cloud models. F5 says policies can be deployed directly through its own GUI or using third party solutions such as Cisco ACI or VMware NSX.

Along with the other product announcements, F5 also introduced its BIG-IP Application Security Manager, which brings with it customisable bot detection methods to help users analyse and track suspicious device activity.

“To better meet the needs of customers, we have made significant investments in security, management, and orchestration, along with the feature-rich software that supports our flagship BIG-IP product line,” said Karl Triebes, CTO of F5. “Giving organisations the ability to integrate F5 with vendors and solutions such as AWS, Azure, Cisco, and VMware is certainly a priority, but we also have an eye toward making sure our offerings resonate with those using open source technologies like OpenStack, and agile infrastructure from emerging ‘born in the cloud’ companies.”