F5's multi-terabit VELOS hardware powers ambitious AI growth initiatives

Tahawul Tech

19-03-2025

F5 has announced powerful new additions to the F5 VELOS product line, giving service providers and large enterprises a unified and customisable solution to optimise modern applications required for AI, safeguard workloads, and reduce downtime across single and multi-tenant application environments.
AI applications are highly distributed, with vast amounts of valuable data traveling in complex patterns. As organizations accelerate their use of AI, high-performance traffic management and advanced security are critical. Part of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform, VELOS reduces complexity of large-scale AI deployments by converging availability, management, and security capabilities.
With the new VELOS CX1610 chassis and BX520 400-Gbps blade, the solution scales to multi-terabits of throughput, suitable for the highest performance NEBS-compliance standards and supporting the most demanding 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) services.
For service providers, VELOS provides 6 Tbps of high-speed L4 throughput for FWA deployments, along with an unmatched 6.4 billion concurrent connections (400 million per blade) for exceptional scalability, and 80 million L4 connections per second for firewall security. Both the VELOS CX1610 chassis and BX520 blade are already deployed in a production 5G network with a Tier-1 U.S. telecommunications provider.
'Making AI practical and simple for end users and practitioners is a massive undertaking, and legacy infrastructure is becoming a barrier for service providers and large enterprises seeking to implement AI-enhanced apps', said Maggie Stringfellow, VP and GM, BIG-IP, F5. 'With integrated load balancing and support for 5G workloads, VELOS optimises performance, streamlines operations, and secures applications in support of hybrid multicloud environments, enabling apps, APIs, and large language models with the services required to unlock the true potential of AI'.
Delivers Comprehensive Performance for AI Workloads
F5 VELOS offers a fully integrated and tested system, providing scalable, reliable performance for any application. Organisations no longer need to engineer their individual application stacks with different combinations of server hardware and operating software, hypervisors, and ADCs. Moreover, VELOS dynamically allocates resources based on workload demands, optimizing traffic flow and ensuring AI models receive the data processing power they need without excess lag. VELOS addresses the increasingly complex and large data traffic volume demands of AI and data-intensive applications, maintaining low latency and consistent throughput for data flows. As a result, end users enjoy a vastly superior experience with AI applications.
Protects any Application from Sophisticated Threats
VELOS defends applications with F5's comprehensive security offerings. It protects against today's expanding threat landscape while maintaining optimal performance, enabled by offloading to FPGAs. With its 5 million L4 connections per second per blade, VELOS is primed to deliver unsurpassed firewall performance. Taking a unified, layered approach to security, F5's extensible architecture supports numerous use cases. Highlights include:
BIG-IP AFM protects networks against incoming threats like DDoS attacks via machine learning, stress monitoring, dynamic signatures, and real-time attack mitigation.
protects networks against incoming threats like DDoS attacks via machine learning, stress monitoring, dynamic signatures, and real-time attack mitigation. BIG-IP DNS can hyperscale up to 100 million responses per second to manage rapid increases in DNS queries. With multicore scalability, DNS Express, and IP Anycast integration, DNS delivery can handle millions of DNS queries and ensures top application performance for users.
can hyperscale up to 100 million responses per second to manage rapid increases in DNS queries. With multicore scalability, DNS Express, and IP Anycast integration, DNS delivery can handle millions of DNS queries and ensures top application performance for users. BIG-IP Advanced WAF defends apps, APIs, and data against the most prevalent attacks such as zero-day vulnerabilities, app-layer DoS attacks, threat campaigns, application takeover, and bots.
Supports Hybrid Deployments and Enhanced Automation
VELOS enables efficient management and scaling of application delivery services to meet increasing demands. It seamlessly bridges the traditional services gap between legacy and modern application architectures by supporting both F5 BIG-IP and BIG-IP Next cloud-native tenants, further realising the promise of microservices-based architectures. With BIG-IP Next, VELOS enables seamless API integration with cloud providers, promoting consistent application delivery. In addition, supported integrations with Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes take advantage of automated deployment workflows, simplifying continuous integration and deployment in hybrid environments. Unifying application delivery and security with modern automation capabilities, organisations can reduce app deployment times from weeks to minutes and significantly improve operational efficiency.
'Service providers and large enterprises are experiencing increased requirements from emerging AI applications, broadband subscriber traffic, and overall application demands, leading to a critical need for increased bandwidth, low latency, and advanced application networking and security capabilities', said Paul Nicholson, Research VP, Cloud and Datacentre Networks, IDC. 'F5 VELOS offers a scalable, high-performance, and consolidated solution that brings together multiple services required into a single solution, such as DNS, firewall, DDoS, CGNAT, TCP, and video optimisation capabilities. Performance and flexibility in the datacentre are of strategic importance to enhanced user and emerging AI-based services, while delivering key resilience and fault tolerance to meet business objectives'.
Availability
F5 VELOS is now available as a 16-RU (VELOS CX1610) and a 4-RU (CX410) chassis, each with support for 100 Gbps and 400 Gbps blades, with limited availability for the VELOS CX1610 chassis and BX520 blade. General availability for the new offerings is anticipated during the third quarter of fiscal year 2025. For additional product-related availability details, please contact F5.
Image Credit: F5