Fastest firewall and enhanced security from new F5 range

F5 has announced enhancements to its application and firewall range to offer throughout up to 640Gbps.

Adding the BIG-IP advanced firewall manager and enhancements to other security offerings as well as the new VIPRION 4800 hardware, the company claimed that it is offering the world's fastest firewall with a capability to manage 288 million concurrent sessions and eight million connections per second.

The newly-launched New BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is built on a full-proxy architecture and by orienting application security around the applications themselves, it claimed that this approach simplifies firewall policy management.

Also added is access control for the BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) and support for Google Web toolkit-written applications in the BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM).

Nathan Pearce, EMEA product manager at F5 Networks, told SC Magazine that these launches were about better access control of the firewall as well increased performance.

“For us it is about building technology to say which application is dealing with which firewall, and it is different from the next generation firewall as that is about outbound traffic and not in-bound, that the data centre needs to know about,” he said.

“It is all about knowing your user base and protecting the data centre from the unknown user base as you wouldn't put a next-generation firewall in front of our types of technology. You are protecting the application - why you have sight of the throughput if you don't know what is coming in”

Mark Vondemkamp, VP of security product management and marketing at F5, said: “Increasingly, we're seeing organisations grapple with attacks that target applications, in addition to more conventional network and perimeter threats.

“Because F5 products occupy strategic points of control within the infrastructure, they're ideally situated to combine traditional application delivery with firewall capabilities and other advanced security services. F5 is committed to a highly scalable and extensible approach for our customersâ€"one that integrates market-leading performance, monitoring, and context-based policy enforcement for superior protection.”