F5-Oracle partnership delivers stunning results

F5 is the global market leader in Application Delivery Solutions, providing technologies that make enterprise application secure, fast and available. But it is F5’s recent work with Oracle in Australia that has got people talking.

Oracle and F5 have been collaborating for more than a decade on joint solutions for customers, however the local Australian teams have only started to work together in the past 12 months. Their joint mission is to improve the user experience for Oracle customers – which they have already achieved and continue to build upon.

Oracle customers can optimise their application infrastructure with F5, yielding impressive performance gains for their web and enterprise applications, while improving the user experience, productivity and return on investment. This can all be achieved in the data centre, without the need to purchase hardware at remote locations.

F5 is interoperable with most Oracle platforms such as E-Business Suite, Oracle Application Server (OCS), Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), SOA, Siebel, and PeopleSoft. And Oracle itself uses F5 devices for Oracle.com and all of their internal and external enterprise applications for their employees worldwide.

The relationship reflects the power of partnerships, which Frontline plays a role in too.

“Frontline has become a very valuable partner, as it extends its local relationship with Oracle and consolidates its performance and reputation across all tiers of the data centre,” said Brendon Thwaites, Channel and Distribution Manager, F5 Networks. “We look for local partners that can deploy end-to-end solutions with Oracle – and Frontline fits this bill perfectly. They act as one point of contact for customers seeking solutions-based infrastructure.”

In terms of the technology, what has F5 delivered that makes Oracle applications outperform the competition?

F5 is the reference architecture for most Oracle deployments at the application and web tiers, acting as a bridge to the network. “In many instances, applications and the network fail to ‘talk’ to each other. F5 solutions iron out the applications so they better leverage the network for enhanced speed and performance,” said Thwaites.

For example, a user on a bank site will not tolerate 15-second delays between each step in a transaction. F5 ensures the application works at optimum speed on the network, to provide the most seamless experience possible.

In addition to enhancing the user experience, F5 improves availability for enterprise, mission-critical applications. By weaving F5 technology into the Oracle suite, organisations can prevent downtime and increase productivity by setting availability priorities based on requirements such as security, uptime, reliability and performance.

Finally, in terms of file virtualisation, F5 offers its ARX (application resource switch) technology. As the volume of unstructured data on the network explodes, organisations urgently need better ways to manage files in the data centre.

Sitting underneath the web and application tiers and in front of the storage tiers, ARX provides a global name space that transparently separates users from file-based storage devices (eg CIFS, NFS, NAS). For the user, it is an elegant and seamless experience in accessing files; for the IT manager it lowers the cost of storage by moving least-used files to cheaper storage tiers, aggregating heterogeneous file volumes, and facilitating migrations between different storage vendors.

“ARX is a unique file virtualisation solution, which dynamically sits ‘in band’ between the users and the NAS filers. There are no proprietary file stubs and therefore no bottlenecks, creating a transparent experience for users,” said Thwaites.

“Combined, Oracle, F5 and Frontline are delivering a ‘solutions-focused’ approach that enables organisations to achieve things they couldn’t before; ticking all the boxes for performance, security and availability.”

Learn more about F5’s ARX technology

Learn more about F5’s Application Acceleration solutions

Call 1300 362 610 to speak to Frontline about Oracle and F5 solutions.