ISA Server 2004 Enterprise Ships

Eight months after the release of Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 Standard Edition (SE), the corresponding Enterprise Edition (EE) of Microsoft’s firewall, virtual private networking, and content-caching product is finally available. As with its predecessor, ISA Server 2000 EE, the new product is for customers who require higher availability, scalability, and manageability than SE provides. However, EE still lacks the sophisticated failover mechanisms provided by add-on vendor Rainfinity. EE pricing remains unchanged at approximately US$6,000 per processor.

First Microsoft Product to Use ADAM

Beginning with ISA Server 2000, EE distinguished itself from SE by allowing multiple firewall servers to be grouped into “arrays.” ISA Server arrays provide greater processing capacity and greater availability, through load balancing and failover redundancy, and allow all the participating machines to be managed as a single unit.

In ISA Server 2000 EE, Microsoft enabled centralized administration of all EE servers, including arrays, by storing the security policies-processing rules and other configuration information-centrally in Active Directory (AD) rather than on each ISA Server machine. Some policies can apply globally to the entire organization, while others can be array-specific. The benefit of using AD’s distributed, replicated database for policy storage was that it eliminates a single point of failure and, because AD is included free with Windows Server, it keeps costs down. However, security experts were not fond of a security architecture in which firewalls have write access to an organization’s main authentication database.