F5 Teams with NetApp and VMware to Enable Live Migration for Applications

November 21, 2011

Based on recent performance testing results, this new solution combines the companies’ technologies to help customers seamlessly migrate live virtual machines between data centers without any perceivable disruption to users or applications.

“Strong partnerships with industry leaders such as NetApp and VMware help us maximize the efficiency of customers’ virtualization and cloud deployments,” said Jim Ritchings, VP of Business Development at F5 Networks. “By implementing F5, NetApp, and VMware products in concert, our customers can dynamically and cost effectively scale application resources across data centers, providing higher availability and optimized performance for multiple scenarios—including geographically dispersed users, disaster avoidance, and consolidation efforts—to avoid planned downtime within data centers.”

F5 has continued its collaboration with NetApp and VMware to further simplify the migration of applications between data centers. Combining F5, NetApp, and VMware technologies, customers can optimize performance to improve the effectiveness of live migrations of virtual machines as well as applications that were not originally designed for distributed deployment.

The combination of VMware vSphere5, VMware vMotion, NetApp FlexCache, and F5’s BIG-IP products enables customers to seamlessly distribute application deployments and virtual machines across multiple data centers, bolstering business continuity/disaster avoidance efforts. Through F5’s broader BIG-IP portfolio of Local Traffic Manager™, Global Traffic Manager™, and WAN Optimization Manager™ solutions, F5 ensures that user requests can be redirected and optimized throughout the migration process, meaning that systems can stay online and users maintain access to applications and data. In addition, because the solution has been validated through joint testing efforts, customers can be confident of reliable performance and optimized availability.

“With the combined solution, customers can extend the benefits of virtualization beyond traditional, siloed data centers,” said Patrick Rogers, VP, Corporate Alliances at NetApp. “Customers can enjoy more control over dynamic resources, including where applications reside and the physical resources they can access. With enhanced application mobility, organizations are in a better position to proactively address changing conditions, including potential disaster scenarios in which application resources need to be diverted quickly from a site or location under duress.”

“As many organizations build out their application deployment models using virtualization and cloud technologies, interoperable solutions are increasingly attractive,” said Parag Patel, VP, Global Strategic Alliances at VMware. “VMware partners with leading network and storage vendors to help customers get the most out of their IT investments. F5 solutions, combined with VMware and NetApp technologies, enable organizations to overcome network latency across broader distances, providing fast and powerful live migration capabilities with vMotion and now Metro vMotion. We look forward to jointly developing further technology enhancements through our strong technology partnership with F5.”

All F5, NetApp, and VMware products and technologies referenced in this announcement are currently available.