[f-nsp] Foundry vs F5

[Peter Wohlers]

At 08:15 09.02.2008, Paul Raj Khangure wrote:
 >I was wondering if anyone had any F5 experience and could give a rough
 >overview of comparitive advantages / disadvantages, or point me in a
 >general direction of where to concentrate on evaluation.
 >

basic differences that I would see would be mostly on how you plan on 
using it. If you're only switching on L4, Foundry offers a fast, cheap 
solution. If you're interested in any sort of advanced application 
switching, F5 is pretty nice. The cli is robust and coupled with linux 
under the hood allows for all the fun you can muster. It has a nice 
configuration synchronization (mebbe it's just me, but I've never been 
able to get that working on the SI stuff) and features that make it easy 
to manage. The things that you need to be aware of with F5 is how 
different types of profiles alter the level of hardware accelleration 
that the platform provides. i.e. if you're just doing L4 switching, it 
can be completely done in hardware; full-proxy L7 rule-based switching 
and you are dealing with cpu-limitations. My experience showed that 
something like the 6400 platform which is sold as a 2g throughput box 
drops down to about 600mbps when fully l7 switched. ymmv based on the 
complexity of your rules.

And yeah, R. Oliver's point about it having a pretty gui is true (it's 
actually pretty nice, compared the the SI-brokenness of it's gui). 
License model isn't really bad. Depends on what you want to do with your 
box. I always just used the basic license without issue. Seems 
complicated because you can just do more with the F5 than the SI 
platforms. If you don't want/need ospf, advanced caching, lots of ssl, 
or gslb, just don't buy the licenses.

--Peter