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F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), a specialist in Application Delivery Networking, announced improved live virtual machine migration capabilities for customers leveraging NetApp unified storage and VMware virtualization solutions. The solution combines the companies’ technologies to help customers migrate live virtual machines between data centers without any perceivable disruption to users or applications.
F5 has continued its collaboration with NetApp and VMware to further simplify the migration of applications between data centers. Combining F5, NetApp, and VMware technologies, customers can optimize performance to improve the effectiveness of live migrations of virtual machines as well as applications that were not originally designed for distributed deployment.
“Strong partnerships with industry leaders such as NetApp and VMware help us maximize the efficiency of customers’ virtualization and cloud deployments,” said Jim Ritchings, vice president of business development at F5 Networks. “By implementing F5, NetApp, and VMware products in concert, our customers can dynamically and cost effectively scale application resources across data centers, providing higher availability and optimized performance for multiple scenarios-including geographically dispersed users, disaster avoidance, and consolidation efforts-to avoid planned downtime within data centers.”
The combination of VMware vSphere 5, vMotion, NetApp FlexCache, and F5’s BIG-IP products enables customers to distribute application deployments and virtual machines across multiple data centers. Through F5’s broader BIG-IP portfolio of Local Traffic Manager, Global Traffic Manager, and WAN Optimization Manager solutions, F5 helps ensure that user requests can be redirected and optimized throughout the migration process, meaning that systems can stay online and users maintain access to applications and data.
“With the combined solution, customers can extend the benefits of virtualization beyond traditional, siloed data centers,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of corporate alliances at NetApp. “Customers can enjoy more control over dynamic resources, including where applications reside and the physical resources they can access. With enhanced application mobility, organizations are in a better position to proactively address changing conditions, including potential disaster scenarios in which application resources need to be diverted quickly from a site or location under duress.”
Parag Patel, vice president of global strategic alliances at VMware said as many organizations build out their application deployment models using virtualization and cloud technologies, interoperable solutions are increasingly attractive. “VMware partners with leading network and storage vendors to help customers get the most out of their IT investments. F5 solutions, combined with VMware and NetApp technologies, enable organizations to overcome network latency across broader distances, providing fast and powerful live migration capabilities with vMotion and now Metro vMotion,” he said.