Why did the union of F5 and Acopia make sense?
Acopia is Spanish for “to gather together,” and the idea behind the company was to inject a new level of intelligence into the fabric of the network that would allow you to control storage and servers, and hence, commoditize them. We’re really an amalgamation of systems thinking, network thinking and storage thinking, brought together. We went off and solved this problem of file-level virtualization and data management. Ninety percent of applications in the enterprise address files. So the fact that F5 evolved from the Web server layer into a broader applications orientation, and we moved below them to the data layer, was an interesting synergy. We’re complementary from the standpoint that F5 optimizes the application layer, and Acopia optimizes the data below that layer. From an architectural standpoint, as we started to talk, we saw that we both leverage intelligent proxies to gather the smarts that we need, and the techniques that we use to inject that into the network are similar.
