F5 Networks on Thursday announced that it has joined the NetApp Alliance Partner Program as an Advantage Alliance Partner. F5 is collaborating with NetApp to provide customers with unified application and data delivery solutions to enable more agile and dynamic data centers.

Working together, F5 and NetApp will help customers bridge the gap from traditional to dynamic infrastructures by increasing the flexibility between users and resources. Agile IT environments allow enterprises to respond quickly to change—adding, removing, and changing application and data services on demand. The result is a powerful IT architecture—encompassing security, access, acceleration, availability, and data management—that adapts smoothly to an organization’s evolving IT requirements.

In addition to outlining a long-term strategy, F5 and NetApp are providing immediate benefits to their joint customers with initial solutions that leverage application delivery and file virtualization to unleash the power of data mobility today.

File Virtualization Delivers Transparent Data Mobility
With F5 ARX file virtualization solutions, NetApp customers will be able to automatically and transparently move data at will, dramatically reducing migration times and eliminating costly downtime.

F5’s award-winning ARX solutions virtualize the file storage environment, removing the static binding between clients and storage resources. Data can move freely—even during business hours—without affecting applications or users, and without requiring client reconfiguration. In addition, the ARX policy-based management capabilities allow IT organizations to create “set and forget” policies to automate data movement, further simplifying management and reducing operational overhead.

• Likewise Joins the NetApp Alliance Partner Program