F5 Networks architecture attempts to break down network barriers

February 26, 2001 —

NETWORK TRAFFIC DEVICE manufacturer F5 Networks on Tuesday introduced a networking architecture designed to improve the communication links between applications and network devices.

The Internet Control Architecture is composed of two components that allow applications, such as billing, system management, and ERP (enterprise resource planning), to interoperate directly with the network infrastructure. The iControl communication layer allows network products and applications to communicate back and forth. The second layer, the iControl SDK (software development kit), adds programmable access to F5's content and network management products via an API based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)/XML or via a CORBA API.

This capability to pass instructions between networks and applications can give enterprises and service providers improved control over Internet traffic and content delivery, officials at Seattle-based F5 said.

According to Peter Christy, research fellow at Jupiter Research, in Los Altos, Calif., establishing standard ways for applications and networking devices to talk to each other is an important step forward.

"In the past there was black and white separation [between] the world of the network and the world of the content and applications. Once content was created it was then the network's responsibility without much knowledge of the big picture to get it out to its recipients. Content delivery and traffic management shows there is a lot of intelligence you can add to improve this process," Christy said. "What F5 recognized is that there are better ways to solve the problem using XML. This is one of the first times someone from the network side has provided applications-side interfaces to add this [functionality to the network]."

Christy added that other networking equipment vendors, such as Cisco, Nortel, Foundry, and Extreme, are likely to follow this model in the near future.

An early beta tester of the iControl Architecture, Emmeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves hopes to leverage the system to eliminate "significant disconnect" between applications and network operations.

"Now we are relying on SNMP traffic information, which then has to be gathered by a third-party application, [which] is then trying to manage processes between the networking equipment and the runtime applications. iControl helps eliminate that step to a certain degree because the application and the network equipment would be able to communicate directly with one another," said Dayne Sampson, vice president of information technology at Ask Jeeves.

Signaling early industry support for the architecture, Microsoft said it has added integration for F5's iControl Architecture in its Application Center 2000 management tool for Web applications. This move will help Application Center users scale out applications while driving down costs, officials at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said.

InfoWorld