HP, F5 offer faster app deployment

network and application management product sets, the two companies confirmed on Tuesday, CRN reports.

Specifically, HP will market its Virtual Application Network offerings - which leverage software-defined networking technologies such as OpenFlow - with F5 application delivery network (AND) products as part of validated packages, including for Microsoft Exchange 2010, server virtualisation and disaster recover deployments. Customers will be able to manage their network infrastructures and how their applications move around from a single dashboard in HP's Intelligent Management Center software.

According to ZDNet, by combining the technologies, HP has cut the deployment time for some applications from months to minutes, it estimated.

Initially, HP and F5 plan to bring a variety of automatic network configuration technologies to HP managed networks products. These should boost the performance of Microsoft Exchange 2010, VMware-based backup and disaster recovery, and application acceleration, HP said.

The solutions offered by HP and F5 are more in line with what businesses and employees are demanding now, eWeek writes.

Michael Nielsen, director of solutions marketing for HP Networking, said a key goal of the Virtual Application Networks solution was to get rid of the command line interface (CLI) method of manually configuring network devices and applications, a process that not only was time-consuming but also - given the manual steps involved - more likely to cause errors.

The combination of HP's Virtual Application Networks and F5's ADN solutions creates a more dynamic and automated environment that can scale both physical and virtual resources on demand. Being able to quickly deploy these applications across wireless networks is particularly important, given the growing bring your own device (BYOD) trend, in which more employees are using their personal mobile devices - in particular, smartphones and tablets - to access corporate networks and data.