F5 BIG-IP software from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a load balancing and application protection solution suite available on cloud or via virtual editions, on a subscription or perpetual licensing basis.
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NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Score 8.0 out of 10
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NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection security software offers protection across multiple layers of the OSI model. It provides security measures for Layer 2 (Data Link layer) through Layer 7 (Application layer), ensuring complete protection for network infrastructure.
Application delivery of both simple and advanced applications. It's easy to handle certificate management that do require individual certificates to be installed on each backend server, you can just install the certificate on the F5 BIG-IP and use for multiple backends. Also adding WAF is as simple as adding a generic policy and you will cover 80% of the scenarios.
Arbor has the propensity to deal with even the larger firms. I have been using it for a year span and I don’t have any such complaint which is affecting us in a bad way. I can recommend this to all the companies who want to have a good network behavior analysis and to monitor the problems if there is any chance of it to occur and which has the potential to affect the whole working environment of the company.
It's reliable. We've had very little problems with the technology. Performance is always right on. Metrics are great. They come out of it. We'd like to do more probably with it in the future as we start to grow a lot more.
Arbor's layer 7 countermeasures are very good out of the box, but it is very easy to reconfigure values and see the impact in real-time.
Peakflow SP provides fairly detailed traffic analysis and breakdown for top-N data such as top talkers, top ASNs, top ports and so on. They offer "SP Insight" as a product to build in more powerful reporting on the already-collected metrics with an interface very similar to Kibana or one of its many forks. We are not licensed for that so I can't speak to its capabilities.
Arbor allows for a good amount of automation. Fast flood detection ensures that if pre-determined thresholds are quickly exceeded, preconfigured mitigations can be started or in the event of an extremely large volumetric attack you can trigger an Arbor Cloud (sold separately) mitigation or a remotely-triggered blackhole announcement to drop traffic to the attacked destination IP address(es) upstream.
ATAC (Arbor support) is very helpful. The level of support our organization maintains covers ATAC performing all update functions to all Arbor appliances - SP and TMS.
Recently we have been deploying F5 web application firewall and we have started the deployment. We have already moved applications out there, but we are not yet to the point wherein I could comment any positive feedback or any negative feedback because we are still going through it, right. But as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any drawbacks or any shortcomings on the F5 product lineup.
Arbor is a highly expensive company. this was the major reason behind not going for the Arbor sightline in the first place. Although its features are good but the cost is unjustifiable.
The implementation and the understanding of this tool are full of complexity and perplexity.
I am looking forward to having a new update on it. They used to update their versions quite frequently but it's been a long time they haven’t updated or maybe it is not in their priority lists right now.
Stability of product and easy way to have account manager contact. F5 support team is also always available to help with major issues. Last year during the major OS upgrade F5 team and F5 leadership always shared clear information and F5 team was dedicated to help us to have it closed in record time
It actually satisfies the use cases, but I would like to know what it can do more than just the use cases, which is what I'm looking for, to talk at some point with somebody and figure out what to do next. We probably maybe could be able to do more that we don't know yet.
I've supported F5 for three different companies. Our F5 support has been very consistent, regardless who the customer is. F5 technicians are very experienced and provide good support, even when issues are more related to knowledge than they are with the ability of the product to do what you need it to do.
That's the one thing that really stood out. It was a lot easier to use from an administrator standpoint, so I think that's the one thing that really made our team decide to go with this product versus another competitor. Just ease of use.
We evaluated Corero and a number of external scrubbing services. In the POC, we found Corero's mitigation capabilities to extremely limited beyond blocking common traffic types at preconfigured rates. It's not impossible to configure custom mitigation methods and countermeasures, but it requires a deep understanding of BPF and bytecode, where Arbor is checkboxes, radio buttons, and dialog buttons that all sit next to a graph showing traffic dropped and permitted by the current settings. I'm not going to enumerate each of the cloud services evaluated because the decision came down to the same reasoning. The amount of traffic we receive is enough that it would be prohibitively expensive for our use case.
The F5 BIG-IP has improved all our load balancing needs, we have over 400 LTM VIPs in our environment this all use to be done with DNS round Robin configurations.
we have created unique APM solutions to support our external customer base
