IBM Rational AppScan

In my last post, I introduced my role as Solution Engineer for our IBM partnership and how many exciting solutions we have coming out in our partnership.  Today I’m going to briefly cover one of our latest releases, the IBM Rational AppScan parser. AppScan IBM’s Rational AppScan implements the latest scanning technology to test your web applications for vulnerabilities.  I’ve run this scanner many times and the complexity and depth of its scans is mind boggling.  There are something like 30,000 tests that it can run in comprehensive mode, looking for all types of attacks against a website. ...

Distributing SAP Load using BIG-IP Advanced Monitoring

Several recent forum posts on DevCentral forums have commented on the fact that SAP Landscapes often have asynchronous batch jobs that cause higher CPU loads on certain servers. This causes problems for application delivery controllers because load balancing methods are typically based on connection counts. Picture the scenario where one connection causes a big CPU or memory spike and then goes away. Now you have the same number of new connections coming into the server while one is slammed. The solution to this problem is relatively straightforward and I recently documented this for everyone in our “Deploying F5...

To all my SysAdmin friends I say - Run your databases through BIG-IP and sleep better at night

When I was an “Internet Architect” (lofty title alert!) I used to hear this question fairly often in design meetings, whether to run the database (DB) through the load balancer or not. I would almost always come down on the side of “no there’s no point” because the DBs have their own high availability solutions, they don’t benefit from load balancing and there are usually no multi-master solutions. Also, load balancers are expensive and resources are finite on them. Over the last few years a number of factors have changed, and today the answer is a...