What is BorderManager?

In a sentence, BorderManager is the industry's first integrated family of directory-based network services that manages, secures, and accelerates user access to information at every network border. What's a border? That's the point where any two networks meet, including where a company's intranet meets the Internet.

BorderManager is about improving intranet and Internet access performance. It allows customers to manage, through a single point of administration, their companies' security polices, protect their confidential information, monitor outbound Internet traffic, and reduce WAN connectivity costs. And it does all this while leveraging customers' existing hardware investment in servers, desktop systems, and routers.

BorderManager isn't just a firewall. It includes a whole set of integrated features, which is one of the main things that makes it unlike anything offered by the competition. Others have the pieces, but no one else delivers the whole package--not to mention the fact that individual pieces of BorderManager simply outperform other products.

BorderManager includes these features:

• Advanced proxy cache service significantly accelerates Web access performance, reduces network/intranet traffic, and offloads Web server workload by up to 90 percent. BorderManager delivers the most scalable, hierarchical caching services with a performance capacity of up to 4,055 hits per second and 85,000 active connections using Intel architecture servers.
• Virtual private network (VPN) services deliver secure, encrypted connections over the Internet and reduce costs for expensive dedicated private lines.
• Firewall services provide increased security through three levels of firewall protection that include packet filtering (Level I firewall), circuit gateways (Level II firewall), and application proxies (Level III firewall). A network address translation (NAT) service also allows unregistered IP devices to connect to the Internet.
• Remote access and routing services provide cost-effective, remote client dial-up connections to a company's network and secure WAN routing services.
• Microsystems' Cyberpatrol offers category-based content filtering to help eliminate access to objectionable Web content.
• Single-point of administration through NDS allows centralized, policy-based management of access privileges for inbound and outbound users, significantly simplifying administration, improving security, and reducing administrative expenses.
• Novell Directory Services automatically replicates security data and controls access across the entire network. NDS automates network administration, reduces administrative errors, and ensures consistent user access to intra/Internet resources.
• User level access controls allow organizations to define access privileges to the Internet by user, group of users, time of day, application and content category.
• Cross-platform support allows customers to use popular browser clients for Windows, Unix, and Macintosh to take advantage of BorderManager's unique user-level access controls.
• Runtime version of IntranetWare allows customers to easily deploy BorderManager services within a company's Windows NT or UNIX environment or on new servers in a Novell IntranetWare network.
• Netscape Navigator Version 3.01 provides the industry's leading Web Browser for client-side access.

What does it do for customers?

How can you speed things up? That's where the proxy cache component of BorderManager comes in. You cache the lesson's Web sites locally so that the students can get them at LAN speeds instead of making 30 separate connections over the Internet.

How can you make sure that the kid on the back row is following the lesson, and not surfing over to www.lotsa-sex.com? That's where content filtering comes in. BorderManager can do it by URL or by host address.

What if your school system has computer labs in several schools and you want to link them together? BorderManager provides virtual private network (VPN) technology with site-to-site encryption, resulting in secure connections through the Internet and eliminating the cost of dedicated WAN lines. What if tomorrow you have to go teach in one of those other labs? No problem. BorderManager uses NDS, so the network recognizes you regardless of your physical location.

How can you convince the school administrators to buy a few more computers next year? Your task may be easier now that the IS staff has saved noticeable amounts of time and money on security administration and other tasks, ever since they installed BorderManager with its single point of administration across Internet, intranet, and corporate network borders. Best of all, they tell you, they got all this from a single, standards-based, integrated product. So asking for a few more machines makes more sense than ever.

And the intra/Internet border is not the only frontier where BorderManager can help. For example, it could be used to secure employee payroll records from all internal and external users except the finance department, while still allowing authorized users convenient access via the company intranet.

``Novell recognizes the business opportunities that the Internet offers our customers,'' said Michelle Arden, vice president of Novell's Border Services Group. ``To exploit these opportunities, barriers must be overcome in management, network security and quality of service. BorderManager solves these problems. Now customers have the confidence to integrate the Internet as a critical part of their business.''

Real customers who have already seen the product's benefits rave about it.

``Novell has done a great service to public education by making BorderManager available at an affordable price,'' said Ernie Nicely, director of Computer and Technology Services at Phoenix, Arizona Elementary Schools.

``The CyberPatrol feature is perfect for managing students' access to the Internet. The firewall gives an especially high level of security by allowing us to create our own IP addresses, known only to us internally and not accessible by outside hackers. Best of all, the caching system is like a rocket on rails.''

BorderManager Channel Marketing Manager Mike Dowling said, "It affects everyone on the network, in the speed and security they see. Some will see more benefits than others, such as network managers. But users see benefits mostly in their access to information and the speed with which they're getting it, especially on the Internet."

What does it do for Novell?

Perhaps more than anything else, this product helps dispel the myth that Novell is irrelevant when it comes to the Net.

"The excitement level around BorderManager is intense," said Gordon Evans, Border Services PR manager. "Internationally, on the streets--we're getting calls from the UK, Russia, South Africa about this. There's a huge global buzz within the channel."

"BorderManager is a product that moves Novell clearly in to the Internet space," Evans said.

"It's the first product released under Eric, and everything he's been saying about how we are focused on IP and the Internet, we're showing here. It's extremely significant to Novell's Internet strategy."

Mike Dowling said, "BorderManager will put Novell in a leadership position again. We're clearly leading here. When you look at the competition, we are dwarfing their speed. It's 8 to 10 times faster than anyone else in the market with one CPU. When it comes down to it, Web surfing is basically file serving. We've done that for years."