Raymar's f5 ® Virtualization Solutions

Virtualization

Maximize the benefits of your virtualization efforts

Virtualization can be a powerful tool to help you cut costs and improve availability and management efficiency, but its impact on surrounding IT resources can cause unexpected problems. Whether you're just starting a storage or server virtualization project or you're looking to realize the full benefits of a complete virtual data center, f5® can help you build a dynamic, virtualization-ready infrastructure that will help you achieve your current and future business goals.

File Virtualization Solutions

Reduce infrastructure complexity and storage costs by virtualizing file-based storage

File virtualization provides a layer of intelligence in the network that eliminates the inflexible mapping which typically ties clients to file servers. This technology decouples the logical access to files from their physical location, so files are free to move and storage devices are free to change, without disrupting users, applications or your business.

f5® intelligent file virtualization simplifies data management further by providing automated, policy-based management across heterogeneous storage environments. The end result is reduced storage expenditures and management overhead, and accelerated business workflows.

Business benefits of using f5® with your file virtualization solution include:

• Reduced capital expenditure through storage tiering. Moving non-critical business data off of expensive storage resources to lower cost storage alternatives can reduce spending on disk capacity by 50 to 80%.

• Dramatically lower backup windows and costs. Creating a tiered storage environment and establishing different backup policies for the primary and secondary storage tiers can slash backup times by 50 to 80% and lower overall backup costs.

• Simplified storage management lightens the load on IT. Automating data management tasks and simplifying client-to-resource mappings eliminates business disruptions, eases the storage administration burden, and reduces operational costs.

• Improved file storage utilization and business workflow. Consolidating capacity from multiple devices into a unified storage pool and dynamically distributing demand eliminates bottlenecks before they happen and improves application performance and business workflow.

Infrastructure Virtualization Solutions

Bring services together to work as one complete virtual data center

Virtualization is quickly becoming the most disruptive infrastructure technology in years, causing enterprises to rethink and rebuild their data centers from the ground up. Many virtualization technologies are available to solve any number of problems, but none of these solutions look at the data center as a single entity.

f5® brings these technologies together—including hardware, operating system, and network virtualization—to create a complete virtual data center. Our solutions have been designed to work together to deliver applications to users virtually, helping achieve the many benefits of a shared, virtual data center—including lower hardware costs, better availability, and easier maintenance.

Business benefits of using f5® with your infrastructure virtualization solution include:

• Reduction of hardware acquisition costs. With f5® solutions, you need less hardware—or less expensive hardware—to do the same work.

• 99.999% availability. Our infrastructure virtualization solutions let you bring down one server without affecting the others.

• The ability to bring down an entire data center for maintenance. For redundant data centers managed by an intelligent DNS system, you can bring down one data center for maintenance without affecting the other data centers or impacting users.

Server Virtualization Solutions

Optimize performance and availability with a server virtualization-ready infrastructure

Implementing server virtualization in your enterprise can consolidate resources, save costs, and improve availability and manageability. But if your infrastructure isn't ready to handle the extra burdens that come with adding many new virtual machines, virtualization can cause more problems than it solves.

In fact, more than 74 percent of IT professionals surveyed by f5® consider network issues and application performance to be potential barriers to deploying server virtualization.

An intelligent, dynamic infrastructure is critical to the success of any server virtualization effort. Businesses that implement server virtualization with f5® devices in their environment find that they have a virtualization-ready infrastructure that "just works."

Business benefits of using f5® with your server virtualization solution include:

• Increased application availability. f5® solutions automatically reroute traffic whenever virtual machines are unavailable, so you can maintain application availability throughout both virtual machine migrations and unplanned failures, even across multiple virtual data centers.

• Increased ROI. By offloading functionality from virtual machines, f5® solutions help you free up server resources to achieve maximum utilization and consolidation.

• Better user experience. f5® solutions load balance traffic between multiple virtual machines, whether they're on the same or different physical servers, so your users always get the best possible performance regardless of the application, location, or context.