ISA Server 2004 Standard Edition Pricing

Pricing for Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004, Microsoft’s firewall and Web content caching product due to ship in the third quarter of 2004, has been set at US$1,499 per processor for deployments of up to four processors per server. This pricing, announced at the May 2004 Tech Ed conference, is unchanged from that of the product’s predecessor, ISA Server 2000 Standard Edition.

At the same conference, Celestix Networks, Hewlett-Packard, and Network Engines announced upcoming hardware firewall “appliance” products built around ISA Server 2004. Hardware-based firewalls are generally more secure because the vendor can properly preconfigure the OS and firewall software in the most secure state (a process called hardening). Since the systems are prebuilt, they are also easier to deploy, with the appliance vendor providing full support. However, customers will still have to configure rules appropriate for their security needs.

Even though the current ISA server comes in two editions—Standard and Enterprise—Microsoft has still not announced an Enterprise Edition of ISA Server 2004 with support for higher availability and capacity.