F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Traffic Management, today announced that it has set up a comprehensive resource portal, http://www.f5.com/solutions/ AppOpt.html, where customers and potential customers can learn more about F5's application acceleration technology, see the benefits it can provide in their particular environment, and learn how to deploy it to improve the performance of specific applications. The resource portal includes (1) a detailed explanation of the performance improvement metrics obtained using the Gomez Performance Network, an award-winning third-party tool for analyzing application performance under real-world conditions; (2) a compression tool that evaluates the results that F5 compression technology can deliver under different connectivity scenarios, including calculations of end-user response time improvements and the resulting bandwidth savings; and (3) solution overviews and step-by-step deployment guidelines for using F5's family of BIG-IP products to improve the performance of enterprise applications from Microsoft, Siebel, Oracle, and BEA.

To verify the degree of optimization and acceleration that these technologies deliver, F5 used the Gomez Performance Network to compare results before and after installing BIG-IP. This tool, consisting of a network of over 10,000 distributed computers around the world, differs from most other performance-measurement tools in that it is based on actual end-user Internet connections. Therefore, its measurements take into account such real-world problems as latency and out-of-order-packets. In addition, the tests simulate complete user sessions, averaged over several days and thousands of repeated tests, rather than consisting of single-page hit requests. The real-world nature of these tests means that the results are much more realistic than tests made under lab conditions and promoted by WAN optimization vendors.