F5’s Partner Ecosystem supports Synthesis architectural vision

F5 Networks has announced today partner support for its new Synthesis architectural vision. F5 maintains a thriving community of sales and technology partners, and Synthesis promotes new integration points for companies to collaborate with F5, with the result being more flexible, unified solutions comprising many vendors’ offerings. F5’s open architecture gives partners a strong foundation to deliver value-added IT services and better meet the evolving needs of enterprise and service provider organizations.

F5 Synthesis features elements that have been specifically designed to resonate within F5’s partner ecosystem and help customers take advantage of:
· High-Performance Fabric to Support IT Services – F5’s physical and virtual products form an elastic, multi-tenant fabric to deliver software defined application services™ (SDAS™). This extensible approach enables organizations to combine solutions from F5, its technology partners, and other third-party vendors to support evolving business needs. The F5 Synthesis fabric can support up to 1.28 million instances in a combination of administrative domains and virtual instances by clustering up to 32 unique F5 platforms deployed across any combination of hardware, software, or cloud resources, resulting in a combined throughput of 20.5 TB and connection capacity of 9.2 billion. Unified management enables the automated discovery, topology, and provisioning of the services fabric, reducing the operational overhead associated with manual processes.
· Intelligent Services Orchestration – Beyond just combining disparate technologies, F5’s architectural vision enables enterprises and service providers to seamlessly manage, scale, and automate the richest set of application services spanning device, network, and application requirements for reliability, security, and performance. This helps customers configure infrastructures for cost savings, while maintaining the ability to further programmatically extend and adapt systems, and rapidly deploy new services as needed.
· Simplified Business Models – To better support customers’ ability to deploy flexible services with cloud, hybrid, and usage-based IT models, F5 is optimizing its licensing practices. Looking forward, F5 will examine additional opportunities to address customers’ changing preferences around how data center environments—including software defined data centers—are maintained.
The Synthesis framework for SDAS provides an open architecture based on standard APIs that allows partners to leverage a high-performance fabric to deliver a rich set of application services that complement their go-to-market solutions. This approach enhances partners’ ability to collaborate with F5 around specific industry focus areas and technologies, including:
· Cloud – Cloud providers are enabled with the richest set of application services available to differentiate their offerings from competitors. Taking advantage of F5 Synthesis’ programmability enables providers to easily incorporate advanced delivery services into their own service catalogs. Customers benefit from the ability to consistently apply the same policies and services to applications deployed in both their own data center and the provider’s cloud environment.
· Software Defined Networks – SDN technology partners gain the ability to collaboratively inject the essential layer 4-7 services needed to accomplish automated provisioning and orchestration of the network service stack. The result for customers is a comprehensive, software defined approach to delivering network and application services across data center and cloud environments.
· Security – SDAS include a wide variety of security services, from authentication to identity and access control to DDoS mitigation and web application security. The availability of these services enhances partners’ capabilities to provide protection against an increasing volume of attacks aimed at applications, the network, and end-user devices.