F5 BIG-IP software from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a load balancing and application protection solution suite available on cloud or via virtual editions, on a subscription or perpetual licensing basis.
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Ipanema SD-WAN (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
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French company Ipanema was acquired in April 2015 by InfoVista, to expand that company's offerings into WAN optimization and became part of Extreme Networks portfolio, after the acquistion in late 2021. But the product line is discontinued, and no longer supported or sold.
Definitely in larger environments, more mature organizations that obviously have the budget to spend and want best in class. Where it struggles is those organizations that don't have the funding and money to spend on it and need more basic functionality. So I'd say that's smaller customers we've worked with and kind of mid-market. They tend to get scared when they get the quotes. Also we've had some struggles with account team consistency. So for the sales team, just a lot of turnover and a lot of missteps on customer calls.
Ipanema WAN Optimization solution is best suited for organizations where poor application performance and application visibility are the key challenges. It is effective where most of the customer sites are in areas where bandwidth upgrade is a challenge. Centralised management of devices through Web Server makes it easy to manage & control them.
The great thing is the IP address management that's happening. When you set up the network it's very easy and you don't have to keep on configuring everything together. Again, it's very streamlined and it's one of the biggest players there in the market for this work.
Well, not necessarily the features. I find that we have to change our processes in order to kind of match what F5 BIG-IP does. And it's not a bad thing, it's just that a lot of my engineers want to do it their way, not they F5 BIG-IP way.
It's not difficult to understand the parts of application configurations and features. Setting up new virtual servers with multiple profiles, certificates, and nodes is easy for new users through the web interface, which also translates to programability in scripts, DevOps, or other configuration management use-cases. Users from different backgrounds such as networking and infrastructure can use F5 BIG-IP, while users who are familiar with API calls can easily configure objects without needing to understand the platform at all.
On the occasions when we've had to engage f5 support, they have been great. They have always resolved our issues quickly and been easy to work with and professional. The reason I give them a 10 out of 10, however, is because when we've had issues that have crossed over between the f5 BIG-IP, our Cisco switches, and our Microsoft IIS server the f5 support representatives have been extremely knowledgeable about every product and device involved and have been able to troubleshoot end-to-end without having to engage other vendors.
Some of the problem areas where I feel it wasn't easy enough like troubleshooting, digging deep with packet inspection, security. But Dynamic WAN Selection based on the AQS parameters give this solution an advantage on the other products. Newly added features like cloud application performance monitoring is simplified now.
Customer went through multiple vendors to address their issue related to application performance and WAN performance improvement. We went into discussion with Riverbed and Ipanema. Ipanema WAN Optimization solution fulfilled their requirements as some of the features like teleengine, virtual ipbox extra are an advantage over the Riverbed solution.
I would say from a security perspective, because I manage security, availability is sort of the key area for us and making sure that is properly handled through BIG-IP, that is the biggest business success, I would say from the product perspective.
