F5 Networks yesterday launched a cloud-based DDoS protection suite, marking its expansion into the cloud services delivery space.
Called F5 Silverline DDoS Protection, the offering is a hybrid solution that provides extended security, optimization, and availability services from hosted and managed infrastructure.
The F5 Silverline services delivery platform expands the company's F5 Synthesis architecture to enable application services in a hybrid deployment model: on-premises and/or as-a-service. F5's investment in hybrid services delivery and security intelligence licensing options mirrors the industry's rising interest in providing programmable application delivery capabilities across physical and virtual infrastructures to support software-defined application services and other software-defined initiatives.
"F5's goal is to remove barriers to deploying and scaling application services. Our Silverline offerings will make core F5 technologies available as-a-service to help customers embrace hybrid deployments without forsaking the benefits they've seen in the data center," said Emmanuel Bonnassie, senior vice president of sales for Asia Pacific, F5 Networks.
The launch of the Silverline DDoS Protection service includes several globally distributed scrubbing centers, including one that was set up in Singapore end of last year. "The scrubbing centers have the capacity of absorbing attacks at 1Tb per second. "We are confident that we can mitigate the largest attacks," said Edwin Seo, regional security architect for Asia Pacific and Japan in F5 Networks.
Part of F5's global security operation center (SOC) infrastructure, a scrubbing center analyzes incoming traffic, identifies threats, and removes malicious traffic, ultimately returning clean traffic to the destination Web site with little to no impact to the end user or the network.
"The scrubbing center works like a big washing machine. Although the 'scrubbing' would cause a latency of a couple of milliseconds, it is so slight that it is almost invisible to normal users," said Billy Chuang, manager and field system engineer, Hong Kong and Taiwan, F5 Networks. He added that it would take about 5-10 minutes to divert the incoming Web traffic from a customer's data center to a F5 scrubbing center.