F5 Networks (NASDAQ:FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that FNZ has successfully deployed F5 products to build its Application Delivery Network to support more than 110,000 investors in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Using the F5 BIG-IP system and other F5 products, the company equipped itself from the onset to support an expanding customer base with fast, reliable, and secure access to financial data.
FNZ operates the financial services industry's most complete third-party online account management service. The company's technology, called a "wrap" platform, enables investors and brokers to manage an entire portfolio through a single portal. Banks, securities firms, and insurers—including heavyweights like Bank of New Zealand and the United Kingdom's Standard Life—use customized versions of FNZ's infrastructure in place of building their own.
"F5 solutions are seamless—we don't have to play around with them," said Neil Manning, Head of IT Security and Infrastructure at FNZ. "From avoiding website downtime, ensuring absolute security and accelerating traffic flows, to enabling our employees working offsite access to the network—F5 helps us solve problems and grow our business. In fact, F5 solutions are FNZ's company-wide standard for Application Delivery Networking. That means FNZ's core applications can manage rising workloads for years to come."
Using F5's Application Delivery Networking products, FNZ has dramatically streamlined the challenging task of maintaining high reliability during its rapid expansion across multiple continents. FNZ has standardized on the following F5 solutions:
- BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager - Makes applications secure, fast, and available
- BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager - Ensures SOA application availability and business continuity
- BIG-IP Application Security Manager - Provides secure delivery of web applications
- BIG-IP Link Controller - Optimizes ISP and WAN availability and performance
- FirePass SSL VPN - Offers secure access to applications
- WANJet - Enables LAN-like application performance over the WAN
Maximizing Value from an Application Delivery Network
FNZ has also been diligently seeking ways to extract maximum value out of existing application delivery products. For example, FNZ now uses F5's iRules scripting language—a capability built into the BIG-IP system—to automatically cache logos and other images, so its web servers don't have to load the same bulky graphics over and over. "[The BIG-IP system] has all these extra bits that we didn't use at first," added Manning, "that have increased our site's performance approximately tenfold."