I've been an F5 fan for quite a while since I originally used them to load balance 16 Weblogic instances running ATG Dynamo across several Sun boxen about 7-8 years ago for www.techrepublic.com. Sadly, I don't often get to play with them anymore because most companies don't want (or probably need) to spend the money for them these days.
Today F5 introduced the Viprion product which is very interesting and certainly claiming to be very high performance and scalable relative to other products on the market.
Liberally borrowed from their data sheet some basic statistics claims for a fully loaded 4 blade system. They are1:
- 1 million layer 4 connections per second
- 36 Gbps of layer 4 or layer 7 throughput
- 3.2 million layer 7 requests per second
- 200,000 SSL transactions per second
If you really start moving that kind of data you'll be making your applications complain bitterly probably and your ISP or hosting provider cry and send you very big bills! You have been warned!
Link: http://www.f5.com/products/hardware/viprion.html (Source PDF Data Sheet)1