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Cisco ACE vs. F5 LTM
By Brad Reese on Tue, 02/12/08 - 2:26am.
Application delivery networking vendor F5 has published:
Application Delivery Controller Performance Report
A comprehensive performance evaluation of the:
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Cisco ACE (Application Control Engine Module) 8-Gbps |
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Citrix NetScaler Enterprise Edition 12000 |
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F5 8800 BIG-IP LTM |
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 Interestingly, Greg Ferro - CCIE No. 6920 Routing and Switching, author of the Etherealmind Blog published:
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Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) - introduction and comparison with F5
Which explains why Greg is considering the deployment of both the F5 LTM and the Cisco ACE in his network.
| Cisco ACE Introduction |
The ACE comes in two formats, either a standalone 1RU appliance, or as a Cat6500 module.
The appliance seems to have a faster development cycle and gets the new features early, but the module has more performance in every aspect.
And what amazing performance it is, this thing can perform load balancing at up 16 Gigabits per second, which is about four times more than the F5 8800 (note some conditions apply in the current versions of code, due to ASIC inputs at 8 Gigabits per second but expected to be resolved in future code releases), and at a price about two thirds of an F5 8800.
Note: I accept raw speed is not the only measure of performance see more later.
But not many people are going to need a load balancer at that sort of performance, and the ACE module is a key part of the Cisco SONA strategy.
To this end the ACE module can have up to 250 virtual instances, more than 340000 sustained TCP connection, 15000 SSL TPS.
So this thing has high performance across the board.
Greg continues his comparison analysis with power reduction, functional comparison, virtualisation, management and futures.
| Finally, Greg concludes that for large data centres, you will most likely use F5 LTM where you need it for a specific feature or task, but you would choose to have an ACE module for most load balancing tasks. |
Read Greg's blog entry in its entirety
Furthermore, you may also have interest in the Miercom Lab Test Report:
F5 8400 BIG-IP v9.2.3 vs. Cisco 6500 Application Control Engine Module v A.1.3
as well as more
Cisco vs. Competitor Lab Tests
Video Overview of the Cisco ACE Module
Do you agree with the F5 LTM vs. Cisco ACE comparison analysis of Greg Ferro?
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If you are making choices
If you are making choices today, you might also consider that F5 has announced the Viprion, which offers similar performance to the Cisco ACE, and by using up to 4 F5 blades you can dynamically scale performance. This looks to be a worthy contender and the multiprocessor technology looks like a good choice.
While I don't have pricing information, the idea for some dotcoms-style businesses who have peaky performance profiles, that you can just add another card to get more performance is a nice idea.
I also have become fond of the powershell and iRules editor interface for the F5, this makes it easy to use and delegate work to others.
But the ACE module uses a lot less power (this remains one of the biggest problems we face), has virtualization and is cheaper than the F5.
I still think you need both. ACE for heavy lifting, and F5 for features.
http://etherealmind.com
ACE vs. F5
Good review and discussion, and albeit this post is late, I would make a stronger case for bringing F5 into a new client's large web site management network than I would Cisco's products. I've worked with load balancers since the early days of F5's that couldn't do VLSM and Cisco Local Directors and since tested and evaluated subsequent vendors and generations.
I have had far more unpleasant experiences with Cisco's platforms and they had prior done a poor job of rolling out stable and competitive performing platforms (CSM, ArrowPoint, CSS115xx). They were notoriously buggy and I have it from reliable sources that their Cisco ACE Load Balancer is along the same path with many stability problems and feature problems that warrant some eyebrow raising skepticism. Some problems include resource memory problems, reboots required several times a month, high availability and synchronization easily broken, configurations are complex to manage and loss of connectivity when configurations are large and syncing.
My point is - I believe it improper to recommend such a new Load Balancing platform of Cisco's given their track record of releasing buggy new products. Based on their past record, I would wait at least a good year or two and the code versions have it several iterations before recommending a Cisco Load Balancer. I would at the least not recommend them to the general public until putting through trials in my own labs because reports of which platform is "bigger and badder" in terms of performance and capacity really do nothing for Network Admins who have to support them on a daily basis.
I would like to agree but....
Since I wrote this post I have been working on both F5 and Cisco ACE load balancers solidly. While I can't fault the F5, I am much more excited by the ACE and its potential.
I am now using the ACE 2.1.0 (3.0.2) code, released in April which added the features that I was missing.
Secondly, it has been quite stable. As someone who has been seriously bitten by Cisco code previously, I was hesitant to make a complete endorsement without several happy months to report.
Note that I have deployed the Application Network Manager to give me a very useful GUI to manage all my ACE units in one place. Given that I am running several modules, with more than a dozen virtual instances its a big help in keeping the configurations straight. Some folks are not happy with the CLI, and ANM sorts that out.
One area I have been very happy with, is the advanced debugging that the ACE CLI has. It is much more effective in resolving configuration problems than the F5. I can 'touch' a lot more and get results quicker.
But mostly, the F5 doesn't virtualize and this causes me great pain in having to create nasty hacks all over the network to get the data to go 'through' the F5. Inevitably, these hacks always bite me back, so I tend to use the F5 less and less.
On the other hand, iRules is so easy to use and with a lovely interface. Now, if only ACE had something like that I would be really impressed.
http://etherealmind.com