Dell recently published an interesting piece on how F5's BIG-IP and ARX address some of the key challenges people encounter when they embrace server virtualization.  The challenges they discuss are:

1. Resource Starvation
2. Lack of Application Awareness
3. Unanticipated Costs
4. Unused Virtualization Features
5. Increased Storage Requirements
6. Congested Storage Network
7. Management Complexity

The article From Dell's Power Solutions can be found here.

Tata Motors in India is getting ready to begin taking orders for their $2,500 car - The Nano.  The car comes in 3 variations: the Standard, CX and LX. The Standard is pretty basic given that you can upgrade to the CX and get things like heating and booster assisted brakes.  Moving up to the LX offers options like fabric seats, fog lamps and a mobile phone charger outlet.

If the Nano is successful, it will significantly change the profile of who can afford to purchase a car.  The first production run is 100,000 cars and Tata expects to have a lottery to allocate them to prospective buyers.

What does this have to do with F5 you may be wondering?  Go to the website for the Nano and look at the bottom right portion of the screen.  "Powered by F5 Networks" - they are using F5 products like Web Accelerator to ensure their prospective customers have a good experience online. 

This is Tom who is an F5er and rabid Seahawks fan.

I read the CRN article that @lmacvittie cited in a tweet she sent this morning.  The article contains the following quote from a Nortel partner: “Alteon is still the standard by which F5 Networks sets its sites but it [the Alteon product line] needs a new lease of life,” 

We obviously need to engage with Darren Boyce, the person who made that statement as it couldn’t be farther from the truth.  If we were to use Alteon as the target for where we pointed our development efforts, it would be like driving a car down the road while we only looked in the rearview mirror.  As Mr. Boyce said, the Alteon products need a new lease on life, so why would we model ourselves on them?

What does dictates our direction?  Tons of feedback from customers, prospective customers and people who have selected competitive products.  That’s way more powerful than modeling ourselves after one of our competitors.

Both Radware and Nortel issued press releases yesterday that kick off a process that has been rumored for some time. 

Originally news outlets were reporting that Radware was going to purchase Nortel's Metro Ethernet switching business.  When I heard that, it just didn't sound right and prompted me to write this blog entry.  As it turns out, it was the Alteon business that Radware was targeting - the Metro Ethernet rumor just didn't make sense.

Since Nortel is in bankruptcy, the Radware announcement will trigger an auction process that will allow any other interested parties to bid for the Alteon business.  So, it's not a done deal yet.

If Radware is successful in the bidding process, I'm not sure how existing Alteon customers will react.  Customers would be going from a ship that is sinking to one that lost $7.1 million on revenues of $24.9 million last quarter.  Radware's net loss for all of 2008 was $31 million, up from $12 million in 2007.  The sum of Alteon and Radware's market share will still put them in a single digit range.

Many of the customers who purchased Alteon in the past will have done so because of Nortel being behind the product.  I believe that F5 can provide a better alternative for customers that want the best in technology, support and financial stability in this space.

We came in at #12 on the list.  It's the first time that F5 has made an appearance on this list so that's pretty neat.

While I was surfing around the Forbes site, I also came across a funny thing that they track - a list of the wealthiest fictional characters called the Forbes Fictional 15.

[Update] And here's the article on F5 that goes along with the list.

“I would never go to an organization that deployed Cisco or Citrix LBs (and not F5) because I would have to question their decision making process there”

This was from a customer visit that one of our team members did this week.

According to an article in The New York Times today, Barack Obama's inauguration ranked as the 5th highest traffic generator on the Internet as measured by Akamai since they started tracking this sort of stuff in 2005.

The top events in case you don't follow the jump are:

5. Barack Obama inauguration

4. 2006 College basketball playoffs day 1

3. 2008 College basketball playoffs day 1

2. US eliminated by Ghana in 2006 World Cup

and the #1 traffic generating event according to Akamai....

1. 2008 US presidential election

Today's inauguration event displaced day one of the 2007 US College basketball playoffs to capture the #5 spot.

Events are measured in terms of peak visitors per minute to Akamai's system.  It would be interesting to see what bandwidth consumption is like and number of concurrent connections to gauge how things like video streaming are altering traffic patterns.

2009 is a very different competitive landscape for our BIG-IP business than we've seen in a while.

Juniper exited the space early in 2008 when they shut down their Redline division.  Foundry was acquired by Brocade late in 2008.  And now Nortel has announced their bankruptcy.

For the history buffs out there, Nortel paid $7.8 billion for Alteon WebSystems back in 2000.

There are stories circulating that Radware has extended an offer for a portion of Nortel's business for $30-$50 million.  It's unclear if they are targeting the Alteon business.  If that turns out to be the case, the reduction in value between the acquisition price Nortel paid and the potential sale price is nothing short of astounding.  Radware reported that they had about $137 million in cash on their last earnings announcement. Their market cap is currently $112 million.

Nortel and Foundry combined represent about 10% of the Application Delivery Controller market.  F5 will compete vigorously to get more than our fair share of that as the landscape changes.

A few years ago I commented on product placement used in the television show 24.

Last night I watched the 2 hour "Redemption" episode and noticed the following product placements:

1. Cisco Tele Presence. "Let's go to the tele presence suite" was worked into the script.
2. Hyundai vehicles featured prominently.
3. Verizon & Sprint - if memory serves me correctly, the outside of a mobile phone had one carrier and the screen had the other.

I'm sure there were others that I missed.  If you noticed some that I didn't catch, what were they?

Our folks in IT equipped me with RIM's latest version of the BlackBerry yesterday, the Bold.  Here are a few thoughts after almost 24 hours using the unit:

Things I like:

1. It should work in Japan (and S. Korea).  I'll be heading there soon and will be able to test it out. Hopefully I will have no more crushed hopes after turning on my old unit whenever I got there just in case something had changed only to confirm that it still couldn't connect!
2. WiFi connectivity.  Pretty much everything except voice traffic flows over WiFi once you've enabled the service and defined the networks you want to connect to. Sweet.
3. The screen.  Same caliber as my iTouch - fantastic!
4. A bonus thing I like - the ability to view and edit PowerPoint files.

The things that are on my watch list are:

1. Battery life.  3G+WiFi+Bluetooth+nice screen are sure to suck the life out of the battery fairly quickly.  Will see how that goes.
2. Size.  It's a little larger than previous versions.  Neither a positive nor negative for me yet, just different.  It still fits in my pocket.  I can't bring myself to wear it (or any previous version) on my belt with the holder that comes with it. Maybe I'm still scarred from seeing kids wear calculators on their belts in high school. 
3. The unit locked up twice today when enabling WiFi connectivity.  Power cycling resolved the issue and it's been fine since.

I should have some time to explore the unit a little more in the next week.

I saw an article today listing the top 10 web outages to date for 2008.  It's interesting to look through the descriptions of the events and see how many of the same mistakes from the "web 1.0" world are being repeated.  Create service, service becomes popular, service gets crushed.  As people build out more islands of functionality that plug in to a web 2.0 world, they need to ensure that their island can withstand what the word will throw at it.  This is especially important when creating a service or application that plugs into a raging torrent of traffic associated with popular social media sites such as Facebook.  Business related sites like Salesforce.com's AppExchange might not see as much traffic, but users will be even less tolerant of delays, outages or security issues. 

As standards make the costs of switching between web 2.0 applications for users and business ever lower, the need to make your island the best option out there by being fast, secure and reliable is more important than ever.

Yesterday I met with Joe Panettiere from The Var Guy at our North American partner conference that we held in New Orleans.  We discussed many different topics including what is going on in our partner community, industry trends and finally DevCentral.

Joe has been around the industry for a while and is pretty switched on.  One of the things that Joe mentioned was that he had an Ubuntu Linux system running at home that his family adopted without any challenges.  He also develops content for a site called Works With U directed at the Ubuntu community.  Based on that, I thought he might be the type of person that would be interested in what we're up to with DevCentral.

A few hours later while I was at the airport, I checked Joe's web site on my Blackberry to see if he'd written anything yet.  Sure enough, he already had blogged about DevCentral.  As an aside, I hope that he'll explore the community more and check out things like the interview with Jason Hoffman who is the CTO of Joyent that was posted last week. Jason did an awesome job of explaining why running functions on BIG-IP instead of the applications helps them deliver cloud based computing services that would otherwise be really hard or even impossible.

What really struck me as a result of talking to Joe is that the content he generates winds up in such different places.  He pops up on his own site, of course, financial sites like Seeking Alpha, and the sites he has targeted at the Ubuntu and managed service provider communities.  Syndication has been going on all around us for a while now but the fact that Joe reaches such different audiences with customized content is what caught my attention.

In the old model, when you met someone from the press, you could be pretty sure of which audience the person would be writing for.  You'd meet with networking trade publications to reach the networking crowd, financial reporters to reach the financial crowd, service provider publications for that audience and so on.  As a vendor you would, of course, target your message to the audience you were trying to reach.  Today's model breaks that relationship.  It's more than just the same content being syndicated via RSS to many sites.  Guys like Joe are now taking the knowledge they gain through single interactions and have the ability to customize it into information tailored to many different audiences.  I think it makes for a much more interesting interaction with guys like Joe but it does make it more challenging when you don't know which audience is being represented.

Finally, Episode 48 of the DevCentral roundup sure makes me wonder if was recorded after beer Friday and somehow back-dated to show as being from Thursday instead!  Maybe one of these days I'll get invited to one of those sessions by the team and I'll find out for myself...

For the past 3 years people at F5 have participated in "The Commute Challenge" that is organized by Seattle's Cascade Bicycle Club.  When people accept the challenge, they agree to ride their bike to work at least 5 days during the month of May.  It's a great way to get people out on their bikes for some exercise and save a little gas while they're at it.

Some of the highlights for us this year are:

147 F5ers signed up
21,443 miles ridden (which equates to roughly 21,443 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide generated)
1,354 days ridden
114 people rode 5 or more days during May
F5 ranked 7th for # of days ridden out of all Seattle organizations
F5 ranked 8th for # of miles ridden out of all Seattle organizations

A hearty congratulations go out to everyone who participated!

About a week ago we hosted a webinar entitled "File Virtualization for Dummies".  An on demand replay of the session is now available at: http://info.f5.com/virtualization-webinar.

The session covers how file virtualization works, how Wiley Publishing (the folks who publish the "For Dummies" series of books) is making use of our ARX technology in their environment and closes with Q&A.