Q. from a prospective customer

I am involved in the decision making process for the possible purchase of a bunch of Big IP local traffic managers, primarily to load balance my web apps and static content servers.

 

 

My F5 rep has pointed out an added benefit of buying F5, iRules - I have had a look and agree they look very powerfull, however, one oppourtunity I am particularly interested in is using iRules to increase defenses against Layer 7 attacks.

 

 

There are a bunch of signatures for a bunch of diff attacks, eg P2P (KaZaa, Gnutella, eDonkey etc) and of course HTTP tunneling.

 

 

My question is this, is it up to the customer to write these from scratch (all the brochureware tout "Customized Application Attack Filtering" as a feature.

 

 

Or does F5 offer a service providing attack signature updates for the customer to capitalise upon.

 

 

Hope this is the right place to ask, just thought I'd try the community and F5 themselves rather than getting more sales talk.

 

 

Thanks in advance.