F5 BIG-IP
There are 27 entries for the tag F5 BIG-IP
Every once in a while, as the number of people following me grows (thank you, each and every one), I like to revisit something that is fundamental to the high-tech industry but is often overlooked or not given the attention it deserves. This is one of those times, and the many-faceted nature of any application infrastructure is the topic. While much has changed since I last touched on this topic, much has not, leaving us in an odd inflection point. When referring to movies that involve a lot of CGI, my oldest son called it “the valley...
#F5 DevOps – Managers need to make use of existing technology and adopt culture change. It is entertaining to read all that is currently being written about DevOps. Having been a developer, a development manager, an operations manager, and even a CTO, I can attest to the fact that the “throw it over the wall” syndrome is real, and causes real problems for everyone involved. That is about where my agreement with the current round of pundits ends. The thing is that they talk like there is some fundamental technological reason why DevOps isn’t happening. That’s...
There has been much made in Information Technology about the military quote: “He Who Defends Everything Defends Nothing” – Originally uttered by Frederick The Great of Prussia. He has some other great quotes, check them out when you have a moment. The thing is that he was absolutely correct in a military or political context. You cannot defend every inch of ground or even the extent of a very long front with a limited supply of troops. You also cannot refuse to negotiate on all points in the political arena. The nature of modern representative government is such that the...
Last week, InformationWeek quoted a Microsoft manager as saying there was “No chance” Windows XP would get another stay of execution. This really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, it was only the backlash from enterprises that kept Microsoft from ending support for XP over the last several years. So now that Windows XP support will no longer be available, it is time for even the most recalcitrant enterprises to consider their options. All of their options. The world is changing on us yet again, and the needs of tomorrow might not be the needs of the future....
Sun Tzu wrote that you cannot win if you do not know your enemy and yourself. In his sense, he was talking about knowing your army and its capabilities, but this rule seriously applies to nearly every endeavor, and certainly every competitive endeavor. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses - In our case the strengths and weaknesses of IT staff and architecture – is imperative if you are to meet the challenges that your IT department faces every day. It is not enough to know that you must do X, you must know how X fits (or doesn’t!) into...
When horrid disasters strike and both people and corporations are put on notice that they suddenly have a lot more important things to do, will you be ready? It is a testament to man’s optimism that with very few exceptions we really don’t, not at the personal level, not at the corporate level. I’ve worked a lot of places, and none of them had a complete, ready to rock DR plan. The insurance company I worked at was the closest – they had an entire duplicate datacenter sitting dark in a location very remote from HQ, awaiting need. Every few...
(Booming voiceover voice); Are you running the same tired old network tools? Does your network staff have to administer security and load balancing for each and every application? Do you find application analysts and owners show a growing frustration with the network team’s response times due to overloading? Well get in there and fix that network! Get the tools that you need to make your network more application friendly, reduce fatigue amongst your network staff, and give application owners more control of their applications! That was, of course, a joke poking fun at both the way we run...
An interesting thing about toll booths, they provide a point at which all sorts of things can happen. When you are stopped to pay a toll, it smooths the flow of traffic by letting a finite number of vehicles through per minute, reducing congestion by naturally spacing things out. Dams are much the same, holding water back on a river and letting it flow through at a rate determined by the operators of the dam. The really interesting bit is the other things that these two points introduce. When necessary, toll booths have been used to find and...
One of the things that F5 has been trying to do since before I came to the company is reach out to developers. Some of the devices in your network could be effective AppDev tools if utilized to their full extent, and indeed, I’ve helped companies develop tools utilizing iControl that give application managers control over their entire environment – from VMs to ADCs. While it is a struggle for any network device company to communicate with developers, I think it is cool that F5 continues to do so. But increasingly, the Network is the place you need...
One of my hobbies is modeling – mostly for wargaming but also for the sake of modeling. In an average year I do a lot of WWII models, some modern military, some civilian vehicles, figures from an array of historical timeperiods and the occasional sci-fi figure for one of my sons… The oldest (24 y/o) being a WarHammer 40k player and the youngest (3 y/o) just plain enjoying anything that looks like a robot. While I have been modeling more or less for decades, only in the last five years have I had the luxury of owning an airbrush, and...
It has been a while since I wrote a Load Balancing for Developers installment, and since they’re pretty popular and there’s still a lot about Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) that are taken for granted in the Networking industry but relatively unknown in the development world, I thought I’d throw one out about making your security more resilient with ADCs. For those who are just joining this series, here’s the full list of posts I’ve tagged as Load Balancing for Developers, though only the ones whose title starts with “Load Balancing for Developers” or “Advance Load Balancing for Developers”...
Note: While talking about this post with Lori during a break, it occurred to me that you might be thinking I meant “MS Windows”. Not this time, but that gives me another blog idea… And I’ll sneak in the windows –> Windows simile somewhere, no doubt. Did you ever ponder the history of simple things like windows? Really? They evolved from open spaces to highly complex triple-paned, UV resistant, crank operated monstrosities. And yet they serve basically the same purpose today that they did when they were just openings in a wall. Early windows were for ventilation and...
My older children, like most kids in their age group, all played with or collected Pokemon cards. Just like I and all of my friends had GI Joes and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Kung-fu grip versus hard hands, they and all of their friends sat around talking about how much cooler their current favorite Pokemon card was compared to all of the others. We let them play and kept an eye on how cards were being passed about the group (they’re small and tend to walk off, so we patrolled a bit, but otherwise stayed out of...
One day many years ago, Lori and I’s oldest son held up two sheets of paper and said “These two things are exactly the same, but different!” Now, he’s a very bright individual, he was just young, and didn’t even get how incongruous the statement was. We, being a fun loving family that likes to tease each other on occasion, we of course have not yet let him live it down. It was honestly more than a decade ago, but all is fair, he doesn’t let Lori live down something funny that she did before he was born. It...
Every once in a while, I like to step back a bit and write for those who haven’t been in the field for a zillion years. For starters, it helps refresh the pool of information out there for people trying to research something they haven’t done before. It helps a lot that I enjoy sharing my knowledge, so writing such a blog is like “non-work”. Since I’m gearing up for some holiday time, this seemed like a great time to do just such an article, so I cast about and TCP optimizations came to mind. A lot has...
One of the things that I love about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it. One of the things I hate about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it… And there are marketing geeks and pundits willing to tell you which one to choose before you even know that you have the problem. I was out in Anaheim last week with F5’s rockstar salesforce, telling them about the Future of IT. Or trying to, you’ll have...
That’s a mouthful, but this is just a quick blog to point you at the actual blog I guest wrote for our F5 Fridays series. In short, we’ve been toying with F5 BIG-IP WOM in the labs as a performance and distance enhancement tool for VMWare vMotion moves over the WAN when NetApp Flexcache is deployed. Pretty cool stuff, and while I wasn’t involved in all of the testing that went on, as the Technical Marketing Manager for WOM I did get to see the results as they rolled out of the lab. Take a read if...
Someone said something interesting to me the other day, and they’re right “at 10 Gig WAN connections with compression turned on, you’re not likely to fill the pipe, the key is to make certain you’re not the bottleneck.” (the other day is relative – I’ve been sitting on this post for a while) I saw this happen when 1 Gig LANs came about, applications at the time were hard pressed to actually use up a Gigabit of bandwidth, so the focus became how slow the server and application were, if the backplane on the switch was big enough to...
I owned a book once – long since wandered off in the hands of a friend or one of my children so I can’t give proper reference – where they discuss replication teleportation. Where your pattern is transmitted, but your physical self is not. Back in the 90s, some smart folks at IBM were working on just this theory. In the book, the new copy of you wakes up and they say “congratulations, you’ve made it to Mars safely”, while the old copy of you wakes up and gets the same speech, right before the old copy is killed. The...
A RANGE OF OPTIONS Almost exactly a year ago, I inherited several sets of model railroad trains. Two full O scale sets and two full HO scale sets. They were in varying stages of disrepair, and I wasn’t certain any of them worked. I’m not a train person, but my kids might be – given the chance to try them out. So I took them all to different dealers (who would have thought that different people work on different scales?), and had them all looked at to determine which one was most in...
My eldest son has been having car troubles. To be more direct, he needed a new car. We agreed to help him out financially, let him go do his shopping and comparing, and when he chose a car I took him to pick it up. He chose a used PT Cruiser to replace his worn-out Olds Achieva, and on the way home, tried to familiarize himself with the features of the new car. Anything that the Achieva didn’t have and the PT Cruiser did, he found to be odd to him. And I pondered that as I drove him...
My father was an antique dealer that specialized in furniture refinishing. All of us children spent some amount of time down at the shop getting instruction in how to handle antiques from dishes to weapons to furniture. But each of us got special instruction in how to treat a piece of furniture. The man looked at a piece of broken down furniture with a critical eye, and then caressed it like it was special, he could recover some of the most horrifically damaged furniture with nothing but experience and trial-and-error. The one lesson all of us received over and...
Anyone who has children and travels by car will tell you that there is no substitute for the mandatory array of bathroom breaks that must be taken by those children. One of the many reasons I prefer to travel at night when driving long distances is that children who are asleep are not asking to pull into the next rest stop for yet another restroom break. And I was one of those children. My father once told me I had the smallest bladder on the planet… Right before my mother made him stop at a gas station for me. ...
In a recent blog by Randy George over at Network Computing, he gets a little excited over the prospects of running 100% virtual, and is somewhat dismissive of hardware appliances. Buried in toward the end of the post is a note that says he’ll be running tests of virtual Wan Optimization tools, which explains his excitement up front a bit. Lori and I used to write for Network Computing (NWC), before it went away, then returned as a web pub. We never worked with Mr. George, but we have worked with some of the people who are still...
THE LITTLE GYM AND TODDLER HERD-THINK Lori and I take the Toddler to the Little Gym, a place for toddlers to go hang out with other toddlers and do some semi-directed activities designed to build confidence and muscle. We think it’s really very good for him, and he attends with his cousin (a Cisco Spawn – Shhhh), so he gets even more benefit than most of the children there. One thing that is definitely a truth though is that when kids behave correctly, the other children don’t even notice, when a child misbehaves, all the...
EVERYBODY’S DOING IT (or letting you do it) One of the more interesting bits to come out of recent news is EMC jumping on the primary storage dedupe bandwagon. Since HDS and NetApp were already doing so, HP has a network based solution, and IBM got NetApp’s solution for free since they resell NetApp as their NAS line and also has some functionality built into TSM, that rounds out the crowd of usual suspects. All supporting dedupe of primary data. Backup software has offered compression and dedupe forever, originally to keep the number...
There is an excellent article over on SD Times about multi-core programming and virtualization that delves into the approaches that application developers can consider to take advantage of multiple core CPUs. For those that missed it, I wrote a bit about this not so long ago. I was looking at multi-core from the perspective of how application developers could take advantage of the increased processing power, and why it is that few if any enterprises will bother. But Mr. Handy is approaching the problem from the perspective of “should you bother” with Virtualization becoming so commonplace, and then talks...
