F5's BIG-IP SIP Load Balancing Solution Takes Internet Telephony’s Product of the Year Award

February 14, 2007; 04:11 AM
 F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that its BIG-IP® SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Load Balancing Solution has won Internet Telephony’s Product of the Year Award, recognizing the greatest achievements in the advancement of VoIP and IP telecommunications technologies on the basis of evident vision, leadership, and attention to detail.

The F5 product awarded is a specific configuration of F5’s flagship product, BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). BIG-IP LTM provides the necessary framework to achieve total scalability, availability, and reliability in a SIP environment. The solution is also available on a NEBS Level 3 certified platform to meet the needs of carrier grade telephony.

“Internet Telephony is proud to bestow F5 with a 2006 Product of the Year Award,” said Rich Tehrani, TMC President and Editor-in-Chief of Internet Telephony. “Each year, our magazine recognizes companies that have demonstrated excellence in technological advancement and application refinements. F5 has proven its commitment to quality and excellence while addressing real needs in the marketplace.”

A key differentiator for the BIG-IP product is its integration with F5’s TMOS™ architecture, which delivers industry leading full proxy performance and unprecedented application networking intelligence. Because of this integration, the solution can take advantage of F5’s unique application-fluent scripting language, iRules™. With a full SIP message header parser built in, the BIG-IP solution can access SIP content using iRules. And iRules can be used for custom persistence and protocol modification, adding immense versatility and scalability to telephony environments.

“SIP load balancing is critically important for successful, scalable VoIP telephony environments, and F5 is pleased to be at the forefront of the industry’s offerings,” said Jason Needham, Director of Product Management at F5. “Awards like this confirm we are on course in supporting the demanding and unique needs of the Telco market.”

A full list of Product of the Year winners is published in the February 2007 issue of Internet Telephony.

About the BIG-IP SIP Load Balancing Solution

The BIG-IP SIP Load Balancing Solution provides high scalability, availability, and reliability to the SIP Proxy, Session Border Controller, media servers and many other SIP devices. By performing deep packet inspection, it can distribute and balance SIP and RTP traffic among multiple SIP devices so that service availability is guaranteed even under high call volumes. In addition, the solution can perform advanced health checks on the SIP devices, routing SIP clients away from unstable or unreliable devices and providing increased reliability to existing SIP solutions.

About Internet Telephony® Magazine

Since the first issue in February of 1998, Internet Telephony is the only magazine dedicated to providing information in IP communications technologies. Internet Telephony provides readers with the best information necessary to learn about and purchase the equipment, software, and services. Internet Telephony offers rich content from solutions-focused editorial content to reviews on products and services from TMC Labs and Miercom. The only BPA-audited publication that’s 100% dedicated to providing the highest quality content for the IP communications market, Internet Telephony has 55,000 dedicated readers. For more information about TMC and Internet Telephony, please visit www.tmcnet.com.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking. F5 provides solutions that make applications secure, fast and available for everyone, helping organizations get the most out of their investment. By adding intelligence and manageability into the network to offload applications, F5 optimizes applications and allows them to work faster and consume fewer resources. F5’s extensible architecture intelligently integrates application optimization, protects the application and the network, and delivers application reliability—all on one universal platform. Over 10,000 organizations and service providers worldwide trust F5 to keep their applications running. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington with offices worldwide. For more information, go to www.f5.com.