F5 helps Joyent deliver cloud-computing platform

BANGALORE, INDIA: F5 Networks, Inc. a provider of application delivery networking, today announced that Joyent, a cloud-computing vendor, has successfully deployed the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager solution in its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) server virtualization architecture.

Joyent’s primary cloud computing offering is a line of virtualized servers called Joyent Accelerators. Its customers use collections of Accelerators to power large-scale websites and web applications, said a press release.

One of its many thousands of customers is LinkedIn, which uses Joyent Accelerators to host its wildly successful Bumper Sticker application on Facebook, it added.

“Advanced Application Delivery Controllers can provide significant advantages for both providers and subscribers of cloud services,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner.

“These devices can provide major efficiencies of 20 to 50 per cent within the cloud provider data center by offloading network-related functions from the server.”

Joyent uses F5’s BIG-IP devices as the backbone to its cloud computing IaaS, the release said. The BIG-IP platform provides massive traffic handling (2–10 Gbps), while F5’s iRules scripting language provides Joyent with flexible management and deployment of its cloud-computing infrastructure.

“I’ve looked at the market and tried virtually everything, but there is nothing else like the F5 BIG-IP system,” said Jason Hoffman, co-founder and CTO of Joyent.

“BIG-IP LTM is the only application switch capable of scaling to handle the thousands of back-end systems Joyent needs to thrive. Without it, we wouldn’t have a business, to be honest.”

F5’s BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers enable cloud-computing providers like Joyent to deliver IaaS by offloading huge amounts of traffic and optimizing performance of its customers’ hosted applications, the release added.

“Cloud computing is now a proven, highly scalable, and cost-effective way for companies to increase agility and accelerate innovation while limiting risk and cost,” said Jason Needham, Sr. Director of Product Management at F5.