Here's another post on Japanese Marketing, F5 Style. I've talked about iRules, TMOS, and FirePass and for today I've got our very own BIG-IP. As I mentioned in my previous posts, since I don't speak Japanese, the only way I can interpret this marketing sheet is by the graphics on it. So, again, I'll give you my view on what the message is:
- The guy in this photo is not really a guy at all, he's a puppet since there is no bottom half to his body.
- The left picture shows him with a blue forehead - not sure what to infer from that.
- The puppet has the added "Spock from Star Trek Eyebrow Lift" that was made famous by Leonard Nimoy in the original Star Trek series.
- BIG-IP works like 4 stars in a data center with three racks of servers, but it gets a 5th star when you increase the number of racks to twelve. Plus you get an added blue glow out of your data center!
- Four points are presented around this 5 star blue glow (you'll notice there are four points on each star!). The first one being BIG-IP and iRules, the second being L3 and ICMP, the 3rd is PVA, and the 4th is HTTP.
- If the four points aren't good enough for you, I bet you didn't know there was a built-in matchmaking service available. There is a nifty flowchart guiding you to your ideal product match. I ran through the flowchart and here's where I ended up:
- Do you like lots of ports to stick your wires? : Yes - Move to the right
- Are you looking for a partner in the with a healthy 2U figure? : Yes - Move to the right.
- Do you need 1Gbps? : Yes - Move down.
- Are you sure you want a 2U figure? : Yes - Move down.
- Do you need 10Gbps? : Yes - Move down.
- That leads me to the 8400 as my ideal match.
So, there it is. While BIG-IP didn't have as many unexpected features as FirePass did, it sure did make up for it in sheer muscle. So, I'm an 8400, which one are you?
-Joe