F5 Gets SPDY

Networking vendor F5 has long been focused on application delivery optimization. Now thanks to the Google SPDY protocol for TCP, web traffic can now be accelerated faster than ever before.

In its initial implementation, SPDY was baked into the Google Chrome web browser, only enabling users of that browser to benefit. This year, Mozilla Firefox is set to also provide SPDY support on the client side and efforts are underway to create an industry-wide SPDY standard. What F5 is now doing is providing the ability to accelerate web traffic with SPDY, regardless of the client or server end-point.

“If an enterprise wants to support SPDY in their own environment today it’s only available as an Apache HTTP module,” Alan Murphy, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, told InternetNews.com. “So it’s hard to bring the SPDY enhancements to some applications, including Oracle and non browser based applications.”

F5’s Application Delivery Controller (ADC) portfolio, sits between the user and the server. A new version of F5’s TMOS software, will enable the ADC to proxy SPDY bi-directionally. As such, the system will perform SPDY negotiation between both the user and the server backend, even if the server does not natively support SPDY.

Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
F5 Leveraging Google’s SPDY Protocol

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.