www.f5.com ® BIG-IP ENTERPRISE CONTROLLER Innovative traffic management, application-aware content switching, local and global load balancing in a single appliance ® The award-winning BIG-IP Enterprise Controller brings standard layer 2-3 networking and innovative layer 4-7 traffic management together to significantly increase existing web Key Features & Benefits: server and network capacities. BIG-IP cost-effectively scales enterprise, managed services, and e-Business applications while delivering on the promise of 99.999% uptime. And the • Highest performing local load balancing for combined best-of-class local and wide area traffic management capability reduces rack servers, caches, firewalls, VPN gateways, terminal space, power consumption, and simplifies management. servers, other specialized devices • Available award-winning wide area load balancing wizards in the web interface to customize Intelligence for 99.999% Uptime and local area load balancing in a single appliance scripts. Use the Health Monitors to check if Leading-edge performance and innovation in load a server is responding to WEB, FTP, LDAP, or • OneConnect™ Content Switching reduces bandwidth balancing is critical as Internet business use grows costs and server overhead by up to 20%* other request – or to verify that an application exponentially, and new types of data and (web, database, credit card verification, etc.) applications pose increasingly complex traffic and • 99.999% uptime for both Internet and Intranet is operating properly before sending traffic to applications content management challenges. BIG-IP delivers. that server. • Application Aware Network -- allows applications Beyond The Switch to directly control network traffic by preemptively avoiding application failures BIG-IP is the only load balancer that can receive 99.999% Reliability information directly from application servers • Wide area load balancer, content deployment appliance To leading enterprises and their business-critical (Windows 2000, Real Server, other SNMP and cache appliance integration for comprehensive applications, web site uptime is absolutely critical. systems) to be used in a load-balancing mode Internet traffic and content management BIG-IP helps achieve near-perfect reliability and called Dynamic Ratio (patent pending). • SSL processing and integrated load balancing in a increase the return on investment for their network Additionally, unlike competing products single appliance infrastructure. designed to handle routine switching functions such as routing requests for services (HTTP, Load Balancing: Dynamic Server Activation FTP, SSL and others) to specific servers, BIG-IP Enterprise lets you assign priority levels BIG-IP is capable of reading detailed information • Static and Dynamic load balancing for diverse to servers in a group. If a certain number of in a request header (such as the type of content server platforms and applications higher priority servers ever fails in the group, requested and the IP address of the sender) • Active/Active Controller feature for added a lower priority group will automatically be and using that information to route the request performance, scalability, reliability, and flexibility added to handle the load – ensuring that your to a server best able to fulfill it. • Full stateful session failover from active to backup or site and applications are always on-line. active to active BIG-IP Controller The Fastest Layer 7 Performance • Multiple modes of persistence HTTP Redirect Thanks to F5’s proprietary FastFlow BIG-IP Enterprise further enhances reliability architecture, BIG-IP delivers Layer 7 • Any IP Load Balancing for load balancing TCP and by allowing the automatic redirection of traffic performance that is three to four times faster UDP-based traffic to a different server or site should a single than competing products from Cisco Systems • Firewall like secure device to resist common attacks server or all servers fail. (Arrowpoint) and Nortel Networks (Alteon).** • Smart Content Determination to route requests for Fast Layer 7 functionality provides network content to appropriate devices Fault Tolerance managers a cost-effective way to ensure that • Advanced network monitoring and trending of Internet BIG-IP Enterprise provides fault-tolerance by users will have a productive and trouble-free traffic with the SEE-IT™ Network Manager eliminating single points of failure. By experience each time they transact business distributing end user requests across a group • Bi-directional Secure Network Address Translation over the Internet or corporate Intranet. of servers, caches, firewalls, and other devices, **www.tolly.com – reference report #200204 • 2GB Memory limit – highest capacity in the industry BIG-IP ensures that content and applications • Real-time performance monitoring and statistics are always available. Dual controllers provide Health Monitors • Easy to install and manage additional fault tolerance with automatic fail- Applications and servers of any kind can and over in less than a second. • Configuration wizards minimize configuration errors do fail. But your customers, partners, and users need never know the failure occurred. -Session State Mirroring Health monitors are a collection of predefined Redundant BIG-IP Enterprise Controllers scripts for testing the health and availability of * J. Mogul, The Case for Persistent-Connection HTTP. Proc. provide seamless failover protection of ACM SIGCOMM’95, August 1995. the servers and applications that comprise connections from an active BIG-IP to a your web system. Use the configuration standby controller. (Continued on next page) CONTROL YOUR WORLD BIG-IP • ENTERPRISE CONTR OLLER BIG-IP Enterprise Multiple Load Balancing Methods features an BIG-IP Enterprise provides a comprehensive enhanced choice of load balancing algorithms, as well as configuration UI. multiple modes for different Virtual Server groups: Static Modes Round Robin Ratio Dynamic Modes Least Connections Fastest Observed Predictive Dynamic Ratio (Patent Pending) Control For Servers, Devices and Content - Active/Active Mode appropriate web servers – minimizing the BIG-IP Enterprise lets you easily control and Allows both controllers to simultaneously number of connections to the server and manage multiple servers, applications and manage traffic for different virtual addresses. enabling more efficient use of existing servers network devices from a central location. With In the unlikely event of a failure on one of and network resources. BIG-IP, you can effortlessly balance the the controllers, the remaining active controller following: assumes the virtual servers of the failed 3-DNS Global Load Balancing Applications machine. Add the industry’s most respected global load Citrix Terminal Server balancer to BIG-IP Enterprise for combined - Network Based Failover Lotus/Domino Notes servers server load balancing and global load balancing This can be used in addition to or in place Microsoft Application Center 2000 in a single box that simplifies management, of hardwired failover, and allows a pair of Microsoft Commerce Server reduces rack space requirements and lowers redundant controllers to be physically Microsoft Exchange power consumption. separated for enhanced manageability and Microsoft Windows Terminal Server reliability. Oracle 9i Application Servers Application Aware Networks for Enterprise, - Hardware Based Failover RealNetworks RealSystem Servers Managed Services, and e-Business Every BIG-IP Enterprise Controller includes Sun iPlanet Servers Web applications respond to requests a hardwired failover capability. This includes differently at any given time. Traditionally, load Network Devices one watchdog timer card per BIG-IP and a balancing has attempted to predict the ability Internet servers fail-safe cable that ensures sub-second of the server to handle the next user’s request. Firewalls response. With BIG-IP Application Performance Routers Monitoring and iControl™, applications now Cache servers Link Aggregation/Failover have more input on how traffic is managed, Proxy servers BIG-IP Enterprise supports industry standard since BIG-IP can take input from applications Multimedia servers 802.3ad for link aggregation, ensuring that and take preemptive measures to avoid system VPN, NFS and LDAP servers maximum throughput can be attained and that failures. …and others high reliability and availability are built into IP Protocols your system at every point. “Akamaization” On-The-Fly Web (http) Customers using Akamai’s Free Flow service FTP can use BIG-IP Enterprise to “Akamaize” their UDP Superior Return on Investment content without having to rewrite all of their DNS Doing more with less is everything these days. HTML code – saving countless hours of Streaming Audio/Video BIG-IP reduces the need for increasingly larger development time for dynamically updated E-Mail and more expensive servers to accommodate sites, or sites with heavy amounts of content. LDAP increases in network traffic. It enables many TCP inexpensive servers to function as a single, virtual SSL server. And its intelligent features help customers Superior Load Balancing and Traffic …and others reduce their total cost of ownership for their web Management infrastructure. BIG-IP ensures that your mission-critical Internet- SSL Processing/Integrated Load Balancing based servers and other devices are continuously BIG-IP combines fast SSL (Secure Socket Layer) OneConnect™ Content Switching available and performing reliably – with load processing with intelligent traffic management OneConnect eliminates the need for clients balancing capabilities that first set the standard and load balancing - giving e-Businesses SSL to open up a separate TCP connection for for intelligent traffic management – and continue acceleration and secure connections with each of the objects that make up a Web page to do so. feature-rich intelligent traffic and content – speeding page-load performance and control. It’s the single-source solution for reducing bandwidth requirements by up to ISP Load Balancing dramatically improving the performance of 20 percent. With OneConnect, the server Enterprise network environments provision your servers while providing security, speed and network can do more work and handle multiple ISPs to build redundancy into all and traffic management during business-critical more traffic, without adding more equipment. systems, including Internet connectivity. online transactions. BIG-IP Enterprise can load balance and maintain Client Aggregation network connectivity along multiple ISP paths, Client Aggregation takes requests from ensuring high availability and reliability in any separate users and consolidates them on deployment. (Continued on next page) BIG-IP. Consolidated traffic is then sent to CONTROL YOUR WORLD BIG-IP • ENTERPRISE CONTR OLLER Quality of Service and Type-of-Service Superior Management and Configuration VLANs and Tagged VLANs Support VLANs (virtual LANs) allow networks to be BIG-IP consists of F5’s proprietary software on a Differentiation in service levels can set your administratively divided into numerous separate pre-configured, industry-standard hardware web system or service offering apart from LANs. BIG-IP Enterprise supports the familiar platform – an appliance that doesn't require the your competition. BIG-IP further enhances VLAN architecture utilized by most modern time-intensive installation of software on your web site differentiation by supporting the switches, providing greater flexibility and ease in servers. It enables routine maintenance or Quality-of-Service (QOS) and Type-of-Service making network topology changes. upgrades of servers without disrupting service to (TOS) standard. With this, your site can the end user. And since it can be used with recognize and provide differing levels of service. multiple heterogeneous hardware platforms, it “Easy-To-Replace Cisco” Feature allows businesses to protect investments in legacy BIG-IP can direct traffic with different policies With BIG-IP, traffic can cross single subnet hardware installations -- as well as to integrate identified by the policy manager. These networks without the need to reconfigure servers’ future hardware investments. priorities can then be sent to the appropriate IP addresses; BIG-IP will pass traffic as a standard resources. In the reverse, BIG-IP can set the bridge. This allows BIG-IP to be dropped into Secure Management priority identifier on the traffic from specific any network without costly changes – making • Web-based configuration tool that uses web resources. The policy manager then can the replacement of legacy load balancers, such SSL and Access Control Lists to provide manage this traffic. In either case, your business as Cisco Local Director, a snap. secure real-time configuration. resources can be appropriately matched to • BIG-IP command line interface via F-Secure your business requirements. Cache Manageability SSH client supports remote encrypted login - Smart Content Determination and file transfer from most commercial TM nPath Performance BIG-IP Enterprise intelligently determines UNIX platforms, Windows 95, NT and Mac BIG-IP Enterprise includes an optional mode whether content is cacheable or not, then operating systems. called nPath. This mode allows servers to intelligently directs only the correct content • BIG-IP command line interface via a VGA to the cache. bypass BIG-IP when returning traffic back to or serial console with command history. the client. A business involved in downloading - Hot Content Load Balancing streaming media, for example, can choose to Extremely popular web objects deserve special Simplified Management engage this functionality for even faster return treatment. BIG-IP Enterprise identifies this "hot BIG-IP Enterprise centralizes the management content" and allows it to reside on a designated responses on bandwidth intensive, media-rich of server resources and devices such as group of caches. traffic. firewalls, proxy and caches. End users are - Differentiated Services directed to a single virtual address, easing BIG-IP Enterprise provides maximum flexibility The Industry’s Richest Set of Persistence network administration and maintenance. and control by allowing you to create groups Features of caches dedicated for specific functions, The BIG-IP Enterprise offers a wide variety enabling personalized services for unique Easy Installation of persistence capabilities to keep users customers. BIG-IP Enterprise can be installed on almost connected to the right server with the right any type of network. There are no internal information. Persistence modes include: SEE-IT Network Manager or external interface limitations; there are TM Source - a particular user's traffic destined for BIG-IP Enterprise includes SEE-IT - the network just ports with features assigned. This gives a specific Virtual Server will go to the same manager that correlates thousands of pieces of the network manager more flexibility to install server as long as the persistence timer has information from your network and components BIG-IP into the network, and more flexibility not expired. into a centralized, single-glance location for to easily access features on any port. complete traffic management and control. Server - a particular user's traffic will go to Enhanced GUI the same server regardless of the Virtual BIG-IP Enterprise includes an intuitive and Server that is being used unless the persistence easy to use web-based GUI. Common timer expires. configuration tasks are logically grouped, Shopping Cart Persistence - persists on any port, simplifying configuration and management with the same Virtual Server and only switches while reducing the cost of implementation servers if the Virtual Server changes. and ongoing maintenance of your infrastructure. SSL - BIG-IP Enterprise maintains session state for SSL connections based on session I.D., Bridging therefore not concentrating requests from BIG-IP Enterprise bridges packets between the same IP on one server. interfaces within the same VLAN, easing Cookie - Uses cookie information stored by a configuration and deployment of transparent client to direct the client connection to the devices like caches and firewalls while allowing appropriate server. BIG-IP to manage specialized traffic non- obtrusively and ignore the rest. Content Affinity - BIG-IP Enterprise automatically assigns and remembers where data is stored Configuration Wizards across cache arrays, eliminating frivolous Like a car dashboard, SEE-IT centralizes the current status BIG-IP Enterprise includes configuration duplication of content, optimizing cache of your network operations and all network components wizards to guide administrators in configuring memory and increasing the probability of a - speed, performance, and traffic patterns. BIG-IP for most common tasks, making cache hit. installation and implementation easier. Virtual Server - a particular user's traffic destined Wizards include load balancing, e-commerce, for a specific Virtual Server will go to the same Active/Active, virtual server and rules server regardless of the port that is being configuration. used unless the persistence timer expires, or the server becomes unavailable (in this case, BIG-IP Enterprise sends the connections to an available server for that Virtual Server). CONTROL YOUR WORLD BIG-IP • ENTERPRISE CONTR OLLER • Can perform source route tracing (thwarts BIG-IP 4.0 Specifications: Advanced Security IP spoofing) Server/Node Operating System Compatibility: The BIG-IP Enterprise has a number of inherent • Resists unacknowledged SYN without ACK Any TCP/IP OS, including Windows NT, Windows 95, all security features designed to protect against UNIX platforms and Mac/OS buffers (thwarts SYN floods) common attacks and provide added protection Internet/Intranet Protocol Support: • Thwarts teardrop and land attacks for your servers and network devices. BIG-IP All TCP services, UDP and SSL; nearly all IP-based protocols • Protects itself and servers from ICMP attack ships, by default, in a very secure mode with these Administrative Environment Support: • Does not run SMTPd, FTPd,Telnetd, or any features: DNS proxy, SMTP, F-secure SSH, SNMP, dynamic/static other attackable daemons network monitoring, scheduled batch job processing, system • Uses a security tool that identifies any Network Address Translation (NAT) - status reports and alarms event notification services and ports that receive illegal access BIG-IP Enterprise uses NAT to do the Network Management & Monitoring: attempts following: Secure SSL browser-based interface, remote encrypted login - Frequency: amount of attempts and file transfer using F-secure SSH monitor, BIG-IP system - Port: what port(s) were hit network monitoring utilities and additional contributed Can map well known ports to any ports on software; SNMP gets and traps - IP Address: the source IP address of the servers (Port-mapping): Dynamic Content Support: attacker Well-known ports such as 80, 443, 20, 21 can ASP (active server pages),VB (visual basic script), ActiveX, be mapped to any port number on the actual JAVA,VRML, CGI, Cool Talk, Net Meeting, Real Audio, Real Interface Security and Flexibility servers. This provides greater security by Video, Netshow, Quick Time, PointCast, any HTTP You can control access to the BIG-IP on any making it difficult for intruders to identify encapsulated data interface. By default, BIG-IP denies access what services are running on which port. BIG-IP Device Redundancy: unless types of specific traffic are enabled. Watchdog timer card, fail-safe cable (primary & secondary) This allows BIG-IP to be a good addition to Ability to use non-publicly routed addresses Web Server Application Compatibility: a site's overall security. Any HTTP server for servers: • Using BIG-IP, Internet routable IP addresses Routing Protocols: Client Certificate Check RIP, OSPF, BGP can be saved, thus reducing consumption SSL is quickly becoming the standard for of IP addresses BIG-IP Enterprise Physical Specifications: securing applications. BIG-IP Enterprise F35 Platform • Tight control of allowing and denying ports enhances your control of SSL through SSL on Virtual IP Dimensions: Certificate Checking – allowing you to maintain 7"H x 19"W x 17.8"D (per unit) 4U Industry standard rackmount chassis a list of authorized Certificate Authorities. The BIG-IP Enterprise is a default deny If the client doesn’t present a certificate that Weight: device that resists common attacks. BIG-IP: 36.5 lbs. (per unit) matches the list, the client will be denied access • Uses Packet filtering to limit or deny access –strengthening the security of your system. Processor: to and from Internet sites based on Intel Pentium III 933 monitoring the traffic source, destination Network Interface: or port 10 BASE-T, 100 BASE-TX (selectable), Optional Gigabit • Uses Secure Remote administration based Ethernet on secure shell (SSH) for command line or Hard Drive Capacity: SSL for browser-based management 30 GB • Can reap idle connections (thwarts Denial RAM: of Service attacks) 1GB, optional upgrade to a total of 2GB Operating T emperature: 32° to 122° F (0° to 50° C) Relative Humidity: Redundant BIG-IP Enterprise Controllers are positioned between the router and the server array. 10 to 96% @ 40º C, non-condensing Power Supply: Internet 320W ATX 110/220 VAC 7.5/4.8A AUTO Switching Thermal Characteristics: 983.355 B.t.u./hr (per unit) Maximum (SPECIFICATIONS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTIFICATION) Router The Leader in Internet Traffic and Content Management F5 Networks, Inc. F5 Networks Ltd F5 Networks, BIG-IP 401 Elliott Avenue West EMEA Headquarters APAC Headquarters Seattle, WA 98119 Clarke House 6 Battery Road 65 High Street #26-04/05 (206) 272-5555 Voice Egham Singapore, 049909 BIG-IP (888) 88BIGIP Toll-free Surrey TW20 9EY (206) 272-5556 Fax United Kingdom +65-533-6103 Voice www.f5.com +65-533-6106 Fax info@f5.com +44 (0)1784 497210 Voice info.asia@f5.com +44 (0)1784 497211 Fax F5 Networks, Japan K.K. 4F Pola Ebisu Building Server Array 3-9-19 Higashi, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, Japan 150-0011 +81-3-5766-5511 Voice +81-3-5766-5512 Fax info@f5networks.co.jp ©2001 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. BIG-IP, 3-DNS, SEE-IT, EDGE-FX Cache and F5 are trademarks or registered trademarks of F5 Networks, Inc. All other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. CONTROL YOUR WORLD BIG-IP • ENTERPRISE CONTR OLLER Par t No. SS-BIGIP-ENT 0401