Networking hardware takes compression onboard

F5 Networks provides an option for an integrated Comtech AHA AHA361-PCIX GZIP compression board in its F5 BIG-IP 6800 and BIG-IP 6400 products.

F5 Networks provides an option for an integrated Comtech AHA AHA361-PCIX GZIP compression board in its F5 BIG-IP 6800 and BIG-IP 6400 products.

F5's BIG-IP is an industry leading local traffic management solution that delivers nearly 3x performance over their competition and is the first product in the market with integrated hardware compression to offload expensive HTTP compression functions from the CPU.

The integration of hardware compression allows F5's customers to cost effectively remove the load of the compression function from their servers, speed application performance, and improve application response times.

"F5 chose AHA as our hardware compression vendor because they offered the compression throughput we needed at an attractive price", said Jason Needham, Director of Product Management at F5 Networks.

"Integrating AHA's GZIP compression board into our products allows our customers to more efficiently centralise and offload compression processing from the server tier, and ultimately reduce both the bandwidth cost and download time for delivering web applications".

Comtech AHA Corp's AHA361-PCIX card is claimed to be the fastest GZIP compression solution on the market today.

Using the open standard compression algorithm GZIP, the AHA361-PCIX Internet protocol accelerator supports data transfer rates up to 2.4Gbit/s.

Ideal for manufacturers of storage area network servers, web servers, web accelerators and web traffic appliances including load balancers, firewall VPN servers and integrated routers/switches, the AHA361-PCIX will improve the speed or performance for nearly any system.

"We are excited to see our AHA361-PCIX compression card integrated into F5's BIG-IP product line", said Bill Thomson, President of Comtech AHA Corporation.

"Our HTTP compression hardware has low latency and provides the highest throughput datarate of any hardware on the market".

AHA will also be introducing a full-duplex GZIP hardware compression card during the second quarter of 2005.

Back to top