It's always great when something serves more than one purpose. That's a good chunk of why all those sweet red knives with the Swiss military branding get sold every year (perhaps you know them better as Swiss Army knives). And Distribution Management Inc. recently discovered that they had a Swiss Army knife of their own in the form of F5's Big-IP Gateway.

When Distribution Management Inc. picked up F5's Big-IP Gateway, they were expecting to use it to optimize their WAN, or Wide Area Network, spread out over roughly 15 metropolitan areas across the North American continent. That's a pretty wide area no matter how you slice it, and Big-IP Gateway looked like just the thing to take care of the problems. So Distribution Management Inc. gave it a shot with the trial version for a month, and then bought the program. But what they discovered was that Big-IP Gateway was doing a lot more than what it said on the box.

What the folks running the network found was that Big-IP Gateway was actually helping them get some of the problems they were having with their VDI systems deployed back in 2010 across 300 virtual desktops sorted out. Specifically, problems like getting the most out of their Mitel IP softphones, getting attached USB devices to show up on the desktops, and allowing for single sign-on capability.

This was especially important for Distribution Management Inc. as they have a lot of workers with very specific specialties that aren't always available near an office, so they needed a way to make the necessary remote working as smooth as possible.

The Big-IP system allows bandwidth to be set aside for certain applications, thus allowing the necessary network resources to be on hand, like the 64 kbps you might need for VoIP calling, thus allowing for simpler VDI usage.

Things like this don't always happen, but when they do, they're a serious win-win for all involved; the company that bought the product or service gets a whole lot more out of it than they expected to, and the company that sold it gets a hefty dividend in improved image and better marketing. After all, a quote from a customer that says something like “solved problems we didn't even know it could solve!” is a huge help in marketing any product.

So for both Distribution Management Inc, and F5, the Big-IP system was indeed a big win.