International. F5 Networks announces the launch of its new VIPRION 100GbE blade to support the rapid growth in the number of applications, devices and connection requests. The solution comes in response to the exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), service providers evolving to 5G networks, and also increased protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and malicious content.
The NEBS-compatible VIPRION 4450 blade has two 100 GbE ports and six 40 GbE ports, with support for more than 1 billion concurrent connections when deployed in an 8-blade F5 chassis, meeting massive IoT connectivity and concurrency requirements. In addition, the blade facilitates the transition from 4G to 5G mobile networks and also improves the performance of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and 2K keys with SSL. Performance at this level enables networks to support explosive growth in subscribers and data usage and also promotes the effectiveness of DNS use cases, IPv6 migration and SGi firewall in service provider environments.
"F5's vast portfolio of application delivery solutions in the digital age is closely aligned with the priorities of enterprises and service providers to connect people, applications, information and devices through a scalable and intelligent hybrid infrastructure. It's not just consumer space that drives this growth. Industry verticals such as transportation, healthcare, financial services, and others consume data like never before. From growing trust in applications to an increasing need to scale IT infrastructure very quickly, F5 ensures that application delivery in a hyper-connected environment goes smoothly," said Emmanuel Bonnassie, senior vice president, APAC, F5 Networks.
Unprecedented performance and scale to support and protect critical service providers.
The connectivity demands of a multitude of personal and business mobile devices flood service providers, coupled with the exponential growth of IoT. According to IDC, more than 2 billion people are expected to access the Internet from mobile devices in 2016.
"As the IoT brings with it a flood of connected devices, it is very likely that service providers will need to support hundreds of millions of concurrent connections, coupled with the relentless growth of signal traffic. Therefore, the need for network scalability and extensibility to enable dynamic growth is crucial as service providers explore their options as to how best to migrate from 4G to 5G networks, taking into consideration the exponential expansion of capacity," said Robert Pizzari, Senior Director of ANZ at F5 Networks.
The level of scalability available with the VIPRION B4450 blade and 4800 chassis (on par with its superior configuration rate of 20 million connections per second (CPS), when combined with BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)) helps facilitate migrations of 4G to 5G network service providers. And the VIPRION B4450 blade's ability to support more than 1 billion concurrent connections meets the need for 5G networks to handle 100 times more connected devices.
Security remains a top concern for service providers, and the need for dynamic, pervasive, and even prophetic security against an almost constant onslaught of attempted breaches and attacks on networks of service providers, applications, data, and subscribers is critical. The F5 VIPRION 4450 blade and F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) full proxy approach can instantly distinguish between malicious and legitimate connections and then absorb or discard malicious connections before they consume network resources.
