A.T. Kearney Deploys F5 BIG-IP Solutions

In order to dynamically manage traffic across the firm’s network, intelligently securing, load balancing, and accelerating application traffic, A.T. Kearney chose F5’s BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager. .  F5 Networks (News - Alert), Inc. is company in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), and A.T. Kearney is a management consulting firm.

According to a press release , this F5 BIG-IP solution exceeds value of its IT investments, mitigates expansion costs for branch offices, and offers superior application availability and reliability for users worldwide.  With the F5 solution, A.T. Kearney was also able to look many high-end servers from its secondary data center and redeploy them in branch locations to offer local file and print services.

“F5’s close integration with Microsoft’s UC platform played heavily into our decision,” said Kevin Rice, Global Network Architect at A.T. Kearney. “We went with the F5 solution because it gives us that crucial reliability we need for our Office Communications Server and Lync Server 2010 deployments. In addition, F5 was the only solution that enabled us to seamlessly connect our two data centers and intelligently manage and steer traffic between them. This enabled us to fully utilize our high-end data center resources and avoid adding new infrastructure in our branch offices.”

After deploying the F5 products, we immediately noticed the performance of our application servers—especially SharePoint—just went through the roof. And suddenly, files took seconds instead of minutes to download,” noted Rice.

BIG-IP LTM devices sit in front of the Microsoft (News - Alert) application servers and web servers, intelligently securing, load balancing, and accelerating application traffic. BIG-IP GTM connects the two data centers and automatically routes user requests—whether they originate in Tokyo, Dubai, London, San Francisco, etc.—to the best performing site based on network and data center conditions, business policies, user location, and application performance.

Jason Needham, Senior Director of Product Management at F5 said, “”With F5’s Application Ready Solution for Microsoft Lync Server 2010, organizations benefit from integrated health monitoring, intelligent traffic management, and network optimizations that result in a highly available and responsive solution capable of supporting the demands of real-time communications.”