Cisco ACE vs F5 BigIP LTM

[Martin Kyrc]

Hi guys,

I work some years with Cisco products for load balancing (CSS, CSM, ACE). I'd like ask people who are friendly with products from F5 company for their view to comparison ACE and BigIP products.

I found some performance tests (for example: http://bradreese.com/f5-cisco-citrix.pdf) and some discussion, but all this sources shows that Cisco is ahead of F5.

martin

[kelrud]

I think when it comes to virtualization the ACE may have the upper hand... but you can accomplish some of the same types of things with the BigIP using some trickery. Before the ACE came along, the BigIP gui and ease of configuration was way ahead of Cisco.

I think f5 may have the upper hand in that if you are using BigIP LTMs (local) and BigIP GTMs (global), then have the same type of easy to work with gui. With Cisco you'd probably want an ACE for local, but I don't know that you can do global with an ACE...

[Martin Kyrc]

Equivalent to F5 BigIP GTM is Cisco GSS 4400 (Global Site Selector). I'm right?

I think, benefits of Cisco ACE family products (primary ACE modul, ACE 4710) are:

- RBAC (role based access control and custom roles)

- virtualization (full virtualization with resource management

- licensing (the same HW with license enabled HW features)

- support (TAC)

- performance and the features are very similar

I forgot something?