F5's State of Application Services Survey

Since 2015, F5 has been surveying the tech industry to learn the key issues surrounding application deployment and delivery. Again for 2020, we’d love to understand your company’s current application architectures to help shape F5’s application services strategy. We will be taking responses until Oct 10, 2019.

If you are interested in taking the survey, please continue to this link:
https://f5.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0JJY1SQZyiufT7v?URL_SOURCE=F5DevCentral

F5 Agility 2015 EMEA – Innovate Expand Deliver with Manny Rivelo

Manny Rivelo, F5 EVP of Strategic Solutions and our soon-to-be CEO, shares his vision of Innovate Expand Deliver at F5 Agility 2015. He talks about what hybrid application services means to organizations, how F5 has evolved from just a load balancing company, how organizations use F5 solutions across traditional, hybrid and cloud data centers and how F5 software powers and drives the business. He also shares his favorite part of F5 Agility. Applications without constraints. Thanks Manny!

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Related

• F5 Agility EMEA 2015 - The Preview Video
• F5 EMEA Agility 2015 - Welcome to Edinburgh
• What Are You Looking Forward To At F5 Agility 2015?
• What’s in store for us at F5 EMEA Agility 2015?
• Agility comes to Edinburgh
• F5 AGILITY 2015

Technorati Tags: #f5agility2015,f5,emea,rivelo,hybrid,applications,ceo

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GartnerDC 2014 – That’s a Wrap!

For the 300^th time, ALOHA! For my 300^th F5 video, I wrap it up from Gartner Data Center 2014 with a special surprise clip from the first ever F5 trade show video and a closing song for 2014. Thanks to Robert Haynes (Hybrid is the New Normal) along with Erin and Michael. And a very special thanks to all of you who have watched over the years! Truly grateful and appreciative!

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Related:

• Gartner Data Center 2014 – Find F5
• GartnerDC 2014 – Hybrid is the New Normal (feat. Haynes)
• GartnerDC 2014 – Application Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers
• Highly Available Hybrid
• The Cloud is Still a Datacenter Somewhere
• Hybrid Architectures Do Not Require Private Cloud
• Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference
• F5 YouTube Channel

 

Technorati Tags: gartner,gartnerdc,f5,big-ip,data center,hybrid,cloud,application delivery,silva,video

 

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GartnerDC 2014 – Application Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers

I explain the idea behind Application Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers reference architecture. Driven by applications and workloads, a hybrid data center is really a technology strategy of the entire infrastructure mix of on-premises and off-premises data compute resources. IT workloads reside in conventional enterprise IT (legacy systems), an on-premises private cloud (mission critical apps), at a third-party off-premises location (managed, hosting, or cloud provider), or a combination of all three. Today’s F5-powered hybrid data centers enable organizations to minimize downtime, scale on demand, and increase the ability to reliably deliver new applications and functionality.

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Related:

• Gartner Data Center 2014 – Find F5
• GartnerDC 2014 – Hybrid is the New Normal (feat. Haynes)
• Highly Available Hybrid
• The Cloud is Still a Datacenter Somewhere
• Hybrid Architectures Do Not Require Private Cloud
• Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference
• F5 YouTube Channel

 

Technorati Tags: gartner,gartnerdc,f5,big-ip,data center,hybrid,cloud,application delivery,silva,video

 

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GartnerDC 2014 – Hybrid is the New Normal (feat. Haynes)

Robert Haynes, F5 Marketing Solutions Architect, digs in about hybrid infrastructures. We got hybrid cars, hybrid corn, hybrid clouds and hybrid data centers and Robert discusses the state of today’s data center deployments and how organizations, based on business needs, are using various application delivery platforms, including cloud, to provide reliable, resilient & available applications. Really, how does IT work with departments to deliver a standard set of services? Find out here.

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Related:

• Gartner Data Center 2014 – Find F5
• Highly Available Hybrid
• The Cloud is Still a Datacenter Somewhere
• Hybrid Architectures Do Not Require Private Cloud
• Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference
• F5 YouTube Channel

 

Technorati Tags: f5,hybrid,cloud,data center,services,it challenges,deployment,gartnerdc,silva,video

 

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Gartner Data Center 2014 – Find F5

Like an application delivery oasis popping out of the ground, follow along and watch as I almost trip showing you how to find F5 Booth 253 at Gartner Data Center 2014. #GartnerDC is all about IT Infrastructure and Operations Management and BIG-IP sits in the strategic point of control in the data center. He also previews some of the F5 storylines this week including a new F5 reference architecture ‘Application Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers’. Reporting from Vegas!

 

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Related

• Highly Available Hybrid
• The Cloud is Still a Datacenter Somewhere
• Hybrid Architectures Do Not Require Private Cloud
• Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference
• F5 YouTube Channel

 

Technorati Tags: gartner,gartnerdc,f5,big-ip,data center,hybrid,cloud,application delivery,silva,video

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Available Applications Anywhere

The path to successful application delivery has been a long and winding road for many companies.

Back in the days of Y2K and the dot-coms, applications were often delivered out of a physical data center. This usually consisted of a dedicated raised-floor room at the corporate headquarters or leased colocation space from one of the web hosting vendors—or both.

Soon, global organizations and ecommerce sites started to distribute their applications and deploy them at multiple physical data centers to address geo-location, redundancy, and disaster recovery challenges. This was an expensive endeavor even without the networking, bandwidth, and leased line costs.

Enter the cloud

When server virtualization emerged and organizations realized that they had the ability to divide resources for different applications, content delivery was no longer tethered 1:1 with a physical device. Content could live anywhere. With virtualization technology as the driving force, cloud computing formed and offered yet another avenue to deliver applications.

As cloud adoption grew, along with the software, platforms, and infrastructures enabling it, organizations were able to quickly, easily, and cost effectively distribute their resources around the globe. This allowed organizations to place content closer to the user depending on their location, and provided some fault tolerance in case of a data outage. Cloud also offers organizations a way to manage services rather than boxes along with just-in-time provisioning rather than over provisioning, which can be costly. Cloud enables IT as a Service and the flexibility to scale when needed.

Today, there is a mixture of options available to deliver critical applications. Many organizations have private, owned, on-premises data center facilities. Others lease resources at a dedicated location.

Staying a step ahead

In order to achieve or even maintain continuous application availability and keep up with the pace of new application rollouts, many organizations are looking to expand their data center options, including cloud, to ensure application availability. This is important since 84 percent of data centers had issues with power, space, cooling capacity, assets, and uptime that negatively impacted business operations according to IDC. That translates into application rollout delays, disrupted customer service, or unplanned expenses for emergency fixes.

Many organizations have found that operating multiple data centers is no easy task. New data center deployments or even the integration of existing data centers can cause havoc for visitors, employees, and IT staff alike. Public web properties, employee access to corporate resources, and communication tools such as email require security and back-end data replication for content consistency. On top of that, maintaining control over critical systems spread around the globe is always a challenge.

Simplify. Scale. Secure.

The BIG-IP platform provides organizations with global application services for DNS, federated identity, security, SSL off-load, optimization and application health and availability. Together, they create an intelligent, cost-effective, resilient global application delivery infrastructure across a hybrid mix of data centers. As companies simplify, secure, and consolidate across multiple data centers, they mitigate the impact to users or applications, minimize downtime, ensure continuous availability, and have on-demand scalability as needed.

 

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Technorati Tags: f5,application_delivery,cloud.hybrid,data center,availability,silva,big-ip

 

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Highly Available Hybrid

Achieving the ultimate ‘Five Nines’ of web site availability (around 5 minutes of downtime a year) has been a goal of many organizations since the beginning of the internet era. There are several ways to accomplish this but essentially a few principles apply.

• Eliminate single points of failure by adding redundancy so if one component fails, the entire system still works.
• Have reliable crossover to the duplicate systems so they are ready when needed.
• And have the ability to detect failures as they occur so proper action can be taken.

If the first two are in place, hopefully you never see a failure but maintenance is a must.

BIG-IP high availability (HA) functionality, such as connection mirroring, configuration synchronization, and network failover, allow core system services to be available for BIG-IP to manage in the event that a particular application instance becomes unavailable. Organizations can synchronize BIG-IP configurations across data centers to ensure the most up to date policy is being enforced throughout the entire infrastructure. In addition, BIG-IP itself can be deployed as a redundant system either in active/standby or active/active mode.

Web applications come in all shapes and sizes from static to dynamic, from simple to complex from specific to general. No matter the size, availability is important to support the customers and the business. The most basic high-availability architecture is the typical 3-tier design. A pair of ADCs in the DMZ terminates the connection; they in turn intelligently distribute the client request to a pool (multiple) of application servers which then query the database servers for the appropriate content. Each tier has redundant servers so in the event of a server outage, the others take the load and the system stays available.

This is a tried and true design for most operations and provides resilient application availability within a typical data center. But fault tolerance between two data centers is even more reliable than multiple servers in a single location, simply because that one data center is a single point of failure.

A hybrid data center approach allows organizations to not only distribute their applications when it makes sense but can also provide global fault tolerance to the system overall. Depending on how an organization’s disaster recovery infrastructure is designed, this can be an active site, a hot-standby, some leased hosting space, a cloud provider or some other contained compute location. As soon as that server, application, or even location starts to have trouble, organizations can seamlessly maneuver around the issue and continue to deliver their applications.

Driven by applications and workloads, a hybrid data center is really a technology strategy of the entire infrastructure mix of on premise and off-premise data compute resources.  IT workloads reside in conventional enterprise IT (legacy systems), an on premise private cloud (mission critical apps), at a third-party off-premise location (managed, hosting or cloud provider) or a combination of all three.

The various combinations of hybrid data center types can be as diverse as the industries that use them. Enterprises probably already have some level of hybrid, even if it is a mix of owned space plus SaaS. Enterprises typically like to keep sensitive assets in house but have started to migrate workloads to hybrid data centers. Financial industries might have different requirements than retail. Startups might start completely with a cloud based service and then begin to build their own facility if needed. Mobile app developers, particularly games, often use the cloud for development and then bring it in-house once it is released. Enterprises, on the other hand, have (historically) developed in house and then pushed out to a data center when ready. The variants of industries, situations and challenges the hybrid approach can address is vast.

Manage services rather than boxes.

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Related

• Hybrid DDoS Needs Hybrid Defense
• The Conspecific Hybrid Cloud
• The future of cloud is hybrid ... and seamless
• Hybrid–The New Normal
• Hybrid Architectures Do Not Require Private Cloud

 

Technorati Tags: f5,hybrid,cloud,datacenter,applications,availability,silva

 

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