F5 Application Ready Network for Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture

F5 Application Ready
Network for Enterprise
Service-Oriented
Architecture
F5 Networks: Dan WrightJoe JordanLori Mac VittieRon CarovanoRandy ClevelandSAP Labs: Swapan SahaJoerg Nalik
A Network Services
Advisory Group Project
July 2007 1.0esc@sap.com December 2007 1.1http://esc.sap.comTable of Contents
1 Introduction ..........................................................................................12 Business Use Cases ............................................................................33 Test Landscape....................................................................................54 Test Methodology...............................................................................105 Test Results........................................................................................136 Unquantified F5 Benefits...................................................................217 Summary.............................................................................................248 References..........................................................................................25
© 2008 An SAP Enterprise Service Community Paper Page iiSAP LABs July 20071 Introduction
CIOs, application owners, and application architects are facing an ever-increasing amount of newrequirements to extend their services to be available everywhere around the world. Meanwhile,they still need to consolidate data centers and business applications in order to lower costs,address new compliance rules (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA), and much more. Solutions need tosupport the extended enterprise (Figure 1), which no longer ends at the doorstep of aheadquarters data center or other traditional organizational boundaries. Company employees,business partners, and customers are all end users and demand secure and responsive accessto business applications, regardless of location. In addition, the need to facilitate inter- and intra-company business application integration (enabled by service-oriented architecture (SOA)) hasled to the rise in application-to-application traffic. As a result, "the network" becomes theincreasingly important glue in between globally distributed business application components andend users.SAP addresses modern business needs through enterprise service-oriented architecture(enterprise SOA) solutions, which are often delivered via the F5 Application Ready Network(ARN). In this paper, SAP and F5 present how modern application and network technologies canbe combined to form productive SAP business application landscapes that perform well andsecurely when used globally. The work is based on the results of an SAP Enterprise ServicesCommunity Network test Lab (ENL) project in which a number of leading network and testsolution vendors and SAP teamed up to build a production-like SAP enterprise SOA landscape,including applications, local end user, and remote end user simulations.
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Figure 1. Extended Enterprise
© 2008 An SAP Enterprise Service Community Paper Page 1SAP LABs July 2007When deploying SAP® applications, organizations follow SAP Best Practices recommendationsto make sure these applications are installed and configured optimally. However, poorperformance of intranet or Internet wide area networks (WANs) for delivering SAP businesssolutions to end users can be problematic, as it impedes adoption rates and introducesunnecessary delay into business processes. End users faced with a new application are alreadyresistant to change. If the performance... [download for more]