F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
Application Delivery with Programmable Infrastructure

Overview:

Applications drive innovation and profitability, allowing your business to leverage trends such as cloud computing, mobility, and software-defined networking (SDN). Your IT department depends on your network infrastructure to meet the challenges of today—and tomorrow.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) helps you deliver your applications to your users in a reliable, secure, and optimized way. You get the extensibility and flexibility of application services with the programmability you need to manage your physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. With BIG-IP LTM, you have the power to simplify, automate, and customize applications faster and more predictably.

Key Benefits

Deliver applications rapidly and reliably
Optimize for today’s web applications with HTTP/2 to ensure that your customers and users have access to the applications they need—whenever they need them.

Automate and customize with programmable infrastructure
Control your applications—from connection and traffic to configuration and management—with F5 iRules LX, the next stage of evolution for network programmability that brings Node.js language support to the BIG-IP platform.

Transition to SDN and cloud networks
Realize operational consistency and comply with business needs across physical, virtual, and cloud environments with deployment flexibility and scalability.

Easily deploy and manage applications
User-defined F5 iApps Templates make it easy to deploy, manage, and get complete visibility into your applications.

Secure your critical applications
Protect the apps that run your business with industry-leading SSL performance and visibility.

Features:

Application Traffic Management

• Intelligent load balancing · Application protocol support (HTTP/2, SSL/TLS, SIP, etc.)
• Application health monitoring
• Application connection state management
• F5 OneConnect · Advanced routing (BGP, RIP, OSPF, ISIS, BFD)
• SDN services (VXLAN, NVGRE)

Application Delivery Optimization

• Symmetric adaptive compression
• RAM cache and compression
• TCP Express · HTTP/2 gateway

Secure Application Delivery

• SSL connection and session mirroring
• Hybrid crypto services (Hardware SSL offload for BIG-IP VE)
• SSL/TLS encryption offload (hardware accelerated)
• Algorithm agility (GCM, ECC, Camellia, DSA, RSA)
• Suite B support including forward secrecy
• Internal/Network/Cloud HSM (FIPS 140-2)
• SSL visibility

Application Visibility and Monitoring

• F5 Analytics
• Performance dashboard
• High-speed logging
• sFlow

Programmable Infrastructure

• iRules and iRules LX for data plane programmability
• iCall for event-based control-plane scripting
• iApps for app-level config management and deployment
• iControl for Management API (SOAP, REST)

ScaleN

• On-demand scaling
• All-active application clustering
• Operational scaling (multi-tenant and virtualization)

Application Intelligence:

Application Traffic Management

BIG-IP LTM includes static and dynamic load balancing to eliminate single points of failure. Application proxies give you protocol awareness to control traffic for your most important applications. BIG-IP LTM also tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers in a group, ensuring that your applications are not just always on, but are easier to scale and manage.

Secure Application Delivery

BIG-IP LTM delivers industry-leading SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, so you can cost-effectively protect your entire user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server. It also defends against potentially crippling DDoS attacks and provides ICAP services for integration with data loss protection (DLP) and virus protection.

Application Delivery Optimization

BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves page load times and the user experience with HTTP/2, caching, compression, F5 TCP Express, and F5 OneConnect. It also makes real-time protocol and traffic-management decisions based on application and server conditions, extensive connection management, and TCP and content offloading.

Application Visibility and Monitoring

Monitor exactly how your application is performing for real users based on application response times, network conditions, and user context. F5 Analytics captures applicationspecific statistics, such as URL, throughput, and server latency, reported at different levels of the service. BIG-IP LTM makes it simple to integrate with your existing tools using industry standards such as sFlow, SNMP, and syslog.

F5 Analytics provides real-time, application-level statistics.

Programmable Infrastructure:

iRules

The F5 iRules scripting language—F5’s traffic scripting interface—enables programmatic analysis, manipulation, and detection of all aspects of the traffic in your networks. Customers routinely implement security mitigation rules, support new protocols, and fix application-related errors in real time. With robust and flexible iRules, you can easily and rapidly develop solutions that you can then deploy across multiple applications confidently.

iRules LX

iRules LX is the next stage of evolution for network programmability that brings Node.js language support to the BIG-IP platform. Node.js allows JavaScript developers access to over 250,000 npm packages that make code easier to write and maintain. Development teams can access and work on code with the new iRules LX Workspace environment and the new plug-in available for the Eclipse IDE, which can be used for continuous integration builds.

iApps

BIG-IP LTM includes F5 iApps Templates, a powerful feature that enables you to deploy, manage, and analyze enterprise application services as a whole rather than individually managing configuration and objects. iApps gives you greater visibility into and control over application delivery—and helps you deploy in hours rather than weeks. This applicationcentric approach aligns the network with your applications and adapts application delivery to business needs.

iApps Templates simplify application deployments.

iControl

The F5 iControl APIs and SDK allow automation and integration of custom applications into all aspects of BIG-IP LTM and other BIG-IP modules. iControl is delivered as both REST and SOAP APIs to fit the model best suited for your organization. With iControl, every aspect of BIG-IP LTM configuration, including most aspects of all BIG-IP modules—from device and application provisioning to application tuning and health and support initiation—can be programmatically automated to achieve dynamic infrastructures.

iCall

F5 iCall is a powerful scripting framework, based on TMSH (the F5 TMOS Shell commandline interface) and Tcl, that helps customers maintain their environment and reduce downtime by automating tasks. It monitors for events and executes scripts to resolve issues quickly and predictably. iCall enables administrators to react to specified events by executing services on the management plane, such as generating a TCP stack dump on a failure, executing a specific iApp to reconfigure application network service settings, or adjusting load balancing weights on application services based on a change in health monitoring data.

Scalable Infrastructure:

Cloud Ready

BIG-IP LTM makes it easy to realize operational consistency and comply with business needs across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, removing the friction of transitioning applications between traditional physical and cloud architectures.

ScaleN

F5 ScaleN technology uses the F5 VIPRION chassis, Device Service Clusters, and the scaling capabilities of F5 Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing (vCMP) to enable more efficient, elastic, and multi-tenant solutions for data centers, clouds, and hybrid deployments. ScaleN moves beyond traditional infrastructure limitations and offers multiple scalability and consolidation models to help you meet your specific business needs.

Virtual Networking

The BIG-IP SDN Services module natively supports VXLAN and NVGRE to offer gateway capabilities with BIG-IP LTM bridging virtual and traditional networks. This lets you keep things simple, applying application delivery network services across both virtual and traditional networks.

Advanced Routing

The BIG-IP Advanced Routing Module allows BIG-IP LTM to provide networking routing capabilities such as BGP, RIP, OSPF, ISIS, and BFD for enhanced interoperability within the network, increasing the resilience and capacity of your network.

BIG-IP Platforms:

Only F5’s next-generation, cloud-ready ADC platform provides DevOps-like agility with the scale, security depth, and investment protection needed for both established and emerging apps. The new BIG-IP iSeries appliances deliver quick and easy programmability, ecosystem-friendly orchestration, and record-breaking, software-defined hardware performance. As a result, customers can accelerate private clouds and secure critical data at scale while lowering TCO and future-proofing their application infrastructures. F5 solutions can be rapidly deployed via integrations with open source configuration management tools and orchestration systems.

In addition to the iSeries, F5 offers VIPRION modular chassis and blade systems designed specifically for performance and for true on-demand linear scalability without business disruption. VIPRION systems leverage F5’s ScaleN clustering technology so you can add blades without reconfiguring or rebooting.

Virtual editions of BIG-IP software run on commodity servers and support the range of hypervisors and performance requirements. These virtual editions provide agility, mobility, and fast deployment of app services in software-defined data centers and cloud environments.

F5 platforms can be managed via a single pane of glass with BIG-IQ Centralized Management.

Licenses and Services:

Simplified Licensing

Meeting your applications’ needs in a dynamic environment has never been easier. F5’s Good, Better, Best provides you with the flexibility to provision advanced modules on-demand, at the best value.

• Decide what solutions are right for your application’s environment with F5’s reference architectures.
• Provision the modules needed to run your applications with F5’s Good, Better, Best offerings.
• Implement complete application flexibility with the ability to deploy your modules on a virtual or physical platform.

F5 Global Services

F5 Global Services offers world-class support, training, and consulting to help you get the most from your F5 investment. Whether it’s providing fast answers to questions, training internal teams, or handling entire implementations from design to deployment, F5 Global Services can help ensure your applications are always secure, fast, and reliable.

DevCentral

The F5 DevCentral user community of more than 195,000 members is your source for the best technical documentation, F5 SDKs, the answers to questions, articles, blogs, media, and more related to programmability and Application Delivery Networking.

Documentation:

Download the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Datasheet (.PDF)