F5 Networks, Inc., a provider of Application Delivery Networking (ADN), on Friday announced that SpringCM, an award-winning cloud enterprise content management platform, uses F5 BIG-IP solutions to meet rapidly growing customer demand. The enhanced application performance and virtual server infrastructure optimization that F5 products deliver are vital to achieving the cost-effectiveness, reliability, and performance required for an enterprise-class cloud service.

SpringCM has seen its customer base grow quickly, resulting in increased application traffic. Compounding this increase is the fact that customers are deploying multiple applications for contract management, bids and proposals, invoice automation, and case management. To provide customers with the best possible application performance while keeping costs low, SpringCM designed its network and application delivery infrastructure using ADN technology from F5 and virtualization solutions from VMware.

“Our application traffic triples in volume every six months,” said Schalk Theron, VP of Operations at SpringCM. “The savings we experience with F5 technology allows us to deliver a more cost-effective service to our customers. Since implementing BIG-IP three years ago, we have not spent a single dollar more on ADN equipment, and we’re using the BIG-IP WebAccelerator module to save at least 30 percent annually on bandwidth costs.”

The SpringCM cloud platform operates on hundreds of virtual machines and includes a pair of BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM®) devices with BIG-IP WebAccelerator™ to efficiently manage web and application traffic. SpringCM also uses BIG-IP LTM Virtual Edition  (VE) at secondary data centers. And F5’s customizable iRules® programming capability enables the company to flexibly manage and monitor application traffic on physical and virtual servers.

SpringCM has realized significant gains from F5 products in both physical and virtual environments. “F5 products help us achieve high flexibility and scale, while keeping costs low,” added Theron. “SpringCM cloud solutions are not only three to five times faster to implement, customers also typically achieve 50 to 80 percent lower total cost of ownership versus on-premises alternatives.”

SpringCM is also evaluating a combined F5 and VMware solution to migrate virtual machines over long distances in real time. “We are very interested in using F5 technology with VMware vMotion™ to drive our international data center expansion strategy,” said Theron.

F5® Management Plug-In for VMware vSphere™
Customers who rely on VMware to increase business agility, reduce expenses, ensure business continuity, and strengthen security for cloud computing can also take advantage of F5 technology to realize further increases in performance, scalability, and availability of applications. The F5 Management Plug-In for VMware vSphere™—a free, software add-on to the VMware vSphere management console—simplifies common BIG-IP LTM administrative tasks in a VMware vSphere environment, helps ensure consistency between VMware vSphere and BIG-IP LTM configurations, and enables basic automation.

The F5 plug-in helps companies ensure that their BIG-IP LTM devices are synchronized with changes to their VMware vSphere environments. The plug-in is highly extensible and installs easily into the VMware vSphere client, helping administrators to:

• Apply existing BIG-IP traffic management policies to newly provisioned virtual machines
• Maintain synchronization using flexible filters to select and associate virtual machines with the correct BIG-IP traffic management policies
• Streamline routine networking maintenance and administration tasks such as server maintenance with controls to easily enable or disable servers directly through the VMware vSphere client

BIG-IP® LTM® and FirePass® SSL VPN Appliance Virtual Editions Validated as VMware Ready™
To help assure that F5 products are highly interoperable with virtualization technology from VMware, F5 also participates in certification efforts. BIG-IP LTM VE is the virtual counterpart to BIG-IP LTM, and functions as a full-featured proxy between users and application servers. It provides a layer of abstraction to secure, optimize, and load balance application traffic among physical or virtual servers. The virtual edition of F5’s FirePass SSL VPN appliance makes it easy to quickly deploy a virtual appliance to add SSL VPN functionality to an existing virtual infrastructure. Both products have been validated by VMware as VMware Ready™ virtual appliances, ensuring full interoperability and optimization in VMware vSphere environments.

BIG-IP Customers Report Higher Efficiency, Flexibility, and Improved Server Consolidation
TechValidate, an independent research organization, recently analyzed operational data collected from F5 customers that have deployed BIG-IP solutions. In response to the survey, customers reported that using BIG-IP in a virtualized environment is highly beneficial. The results showed:

•  65% of surveyed customers considered SSL offload to be an important feature of virtualized infrastructure. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 56A-7EE-A41)
•  70% of surveyed customers valued the ability to move virtual machines between data centers when managing application traffic among multiple data centers using their BIG-IP solution. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: A42-14D-7E1)
•  48% of surveyed customers achieved improved server consolidation by combining server virtualization with their BIG-IP solution. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 531-7C7-86D)
Additional BIG-IP & Virtualization TechValidate statistics are available at www.techvalidate.com/portals/f5-big-ip-f5-big-ip-virtualization-portal-2010.

“SpringCM has used F5 technology to provide its customers with superior application performance, fueling a cost-effective cloud solution,” said Jason Needham, Sr. Director of Product Management at F5. “The TechValidate survey results, which are captured directly from users with first-hand experience deploying BIG-IP solutions, indicate that F5 technology enhances and extends the benefits of a virtual infrastructure.”

F5 Networks at the VMworld 2010 Conference
F5 will be at VMworld 2010 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, August 30 to September 2. Please visit F5 Networks at Booth #1131. For more information about VMworld 2010, see www.vmworld2010.com.

About TechValidate
TechValidate is a trusted third-party service that verifies the usage, configuration, and benefits of technology products and services. The company directly interfaces with business and technology end users to collect and validate information about their deployments. TechValidate’s promise to the end-user community is to provide unbiased, verified information about the usage and benefits of technology products and services. More information is available at www.techvalidate.com.

About F5 Networks
F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on ensuring the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5's flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5's vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organizations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

F5, BIG-IP, Local Traffic Manager, LTM, WebAccelerator, iRules, and FirePass are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. VMware, VMware vMotion, VMware vSphere and VMworld are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners