Technology Alliance Partnership Update Week of September 7, 2012
This week I want to discuss the recent addition of Gale Technologies and their GaleForce provisioning and data center management products to the F5 Technology Alliance Partnership (TAP) program. One of the things that I am most amazed by when talking to partners is the fact that Information Technology is developing along the same lines as other technologies. When first introduced, a new technology is complex, expensive and has benefit to only a small population of adopters. Similarly, the types of persons who can effectively administer, deploy and support these technologies require a high degree of technical sophistication and training in order to deploy them. This has been the case with storage technologies, server technologies as well as networking and application delivery.
With virtualization we have the ability to consolidate compute resources onto fewer physical machines, however the complexity of networking, server provision and storage provisioning is still pretty challenging. If we look at the traditional enterprise IT department we typically see groups of experts in the storage, server, networking and even application disciplines. This allows for a high degree of specialization and sometimes greater efficiencies but can lead to departmental silos and (unfortunately often) longer deployment times.
What really matters when we peel back the different layers of support is that we are deploying compute resources, storage resources, networking and application delivery in support of business applications and most likely revenue. The challenge is that we have these islands of complexity within our data center that prevent greater consolidation, more rapid application deployment and simpler administration. With Gale Technologies and the GaleForce provisioning and management platform, simple templates can be pre-configured to include, storage, compute, virtualization layer and now application delivery with F5 BIG-IP LTM. What this means in practice is that enterprises can now take a data center platform pre-configured to support a virtualized data center like FlexPod and provision F5 BIG-IP LTM for traffic management and application availability. Deploying a private cloud in a simple, repeatable manner is now in reach by combining the best of breed data center designs like a FlexPod with F5 BIG-IP LTM.
Gale Technologies has integrated F5 BIG-IP into their provisioning and management product by using the iControl API which means that investment in F5 and Gale can be protected from future application changes and ensures tight integration with all elements of the infrastructure. We would like to welcome Gale Technologies to our Alliance Program.