Historically, there have been two ways to build application delivery networking appliances; build them for performance or build them for intelligence. In the open market, customers have traditionally selected solutions that exhibit the best performance. As a result, most vendors have built their devices on faster, packet-based designs instead of the poorer performing proxy-based architecture. As the need for intelligence in these devices has grown, vendors find themselves in a precarious position: the more intelligence they add to the devices in response to customer demand, the closer they resemble a proxy and the worse they perform.

F5 Networks initially took the packet-based path, but simultaneously started addressing the root problem - making an intelligent solution that also delivers high performance. The result is the TMOS architecture, a collection of real-time features and functions, purpose-built and designed as a full-proxy solution with the power and performance required in today's network infrastructure.