Application Delivery Controllers Forum

Vel Abenkin

User at a tech company

We are looking at getting a ADC/WAF/LB combination and are considering Pulse, Netscaler and F5. The Pulse reps are touting a fully virtual solution that uses a central bandwidth pool that can be deployed as any type of service that we want. Basically they are saying that if we get 2GB of traffic capacity, we can spin up as many ADC/WAF/TM/LB, either internal or external, and only pay for the capacity with no additional cost for the vAppliances. Has anyone else looked at this solution? This came from Brocade, but originally I think it was called Zeus Technology. This looks like a pretty cost effective solution, as we won't need to buy an appliance each time we want a new App deployed, and can dedicate an ADC per APP.

5 answers

Rhea Rapps

Content Specialist

IT Central Station

F5 BIG-IP or HAProxy, which do you recommend?

One of the most popular comparisons on IT Central Station is F5 BIG-IP vs HAProxy. One IT Central Station user says about F5 BIG-IP, "It provides first-tier firewalling for you application. And it provides server load-balancing, it provides optimization, and it provides a proxy feat" Another user says about HAProxy, "I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime." In your opinion, which is better? Thanks for your help!

5 answers

MikeSchrockHA Proxy is OpenSource http://www.haproxy.org/ free and does basic LBR services and is often integrated on/with/in Linux based workloads and shops. BIG-IP is F5 Networks leading Application Delivery Controller that offers Load Balancer (LBR) and a host of other services. BIG-IP is the flagship line of ADCs and runs a proprietory Traffic Management OS (TMOS) TMOS is quite unique and flexible and allows other Network Traffic and Security functions to run in-conjunction with the core LBR functions. This would include a WAF- Application Security Manager (ASM), Auth/Access Proxy-Access Policy Manager (APM), Global Traffic Manager (GTM), Link LBR....and a host of attached services in the cloud. BIG-IP also is supported by iRules an open scripting language allowing developers to do Layer 2-7 services/integrations on either side of the tcp/ip stack. Also depends if you want a prius or a lexus and how much you want to program.