Implementing F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Project Scope

Our Customer implements F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to optimize their network infrastructure for providing availability, security, and performance for critical business applications.

Customer Overview

One of the world’s leading international consultancies, specializing in engineering, architecture, planning, environment, project management and economics.
A pioneering force in the planning, design and implementation of development projects in the Middle East, Africa and Asia since 1956.
Headquarters located in Egypt, England, India, and Lebanon with 43 offices throughout 29 countries, known for their problem identification, tailor made-designs, quality, on-time deliverables and multi-disciplinary expertise.
Has a previous successful experience with our team, where we deployed their Network Infrastructure in a separate project. Due to the professionalism and creativity perceived by them during the project, they nominated us to implement Cisco unified communication solution.

Business Challenge

F5 offers a complete suite of application delivery technologies designed to provide a highly scalable, secure, and responsive exchange deployment.
Terminating HTTPS connections at the BIG-IP LTM reduces CPU and memory load on Client Access Servers, and simplifies TLS/SSL certificate management.
The BIG-IP LTM can balance load and ensure high-availability across multiple Client Access Servers using a variety of load-balancing methods and priority rules.
The BIG-IP LTMs TCP Express feature set ensures optimal network performance for all clients and servers, regardless of the operating system and version.
The LTM provides content compression features, which improve client performance.

Solution & How We Helped

We Implemented F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) as an intelligent application delivery solution for Microsoft Exchange 2013, the group needed to ensure availability, security, and efficiency.
Two nodes were configured as a redundant pair with network failover enabled for high availability.
Both nodes were upgraded to 11.2.0 to be able to use iApp tool feature, which is used for Microsoft Exchange deployment.
Latest iApp templates for release 11.2.0 for Exchange 2010 were uploaded to act as the single-point interface for building, managing, and monitoring the Exchange 2013 Client Access role.
BIG-IP LTM loads, balances and optimizes Client Access Server traffic to manage, secure, and optimize client-generated Client Access Server traffic using the BIG-IP system.
All Exchange Client Access traffic goes to the BIG-IP LTM.
The BIG-IP LTM loads, balances and optimizes the traffic to the Client Access Servers, including the services which are not HTTP-based: POP3, and IMAP4.
LTM loads, balances and optimizes CAS traffic.

Benefits for Business

BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) increases your operational efficiency and ensures peak network performance by providing a flexible, high-performance application delivery system. With its application-centric perspective, BIG-IP LTM optimizes your network infrastructure to deliver availability, security, and performance for critical business applications.

Accelerate the pace of business

BIG-IP LTM includes F5 iApps; a powerful set of features that enable you to:

Manage application services rather than individual devices and objects.
Have greater visibility and control over application delivery—and helps you deploy in hours rather than weeks.
Align the network with your applications and adapt application delivery to business needs.
Have unprecedented control and flexibility with F5 iRules; a scripting language that enables you to intercept, inspect, transform, and direct application traffic.
Use iRules to adapt to any application delivery challenge seamlessly across the data center, virtual infrastructure, and the cloud.

Protect your critical applications

As the web evolves, expectations around security change. SSL is becoming the norm for any application that stores user information.

BIG-IP LTM delivers industry-leading SSL performance so you can cost-effectively protect the entire user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.
BIG-IP LTM also protects against potentially crippling DDoS attacks. If you need, you can add firewall protection, application security, and access control as optional.

Deliver performance and scale

Faster application performance increases employee productivity, boosts business operations, and drives customer revenue.

Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on application and server conditions, extensive connection management, and TCP and content offloading.
BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves page load times and user experience. Optional add-on modules offer further performance gains, with F5 ScaleN technology that delivers on-demand scaling capabilities.
BIG-IP LTM helps you adapt to shifting performance and application needs.

Reduce downtimes

With damages calculated in terms of lost revenue and reputation, keeping applications consistently available is vital to your organization’s health.

BIG-IP LTM protects applications by removing single points of failure, giving you fine-grained bandwidth control and optimizing your most important applications.
BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers in a group, it ensures that all sites are not just always on, but are more scalable and easier to manage than ever.