ISA Server Steps Onto Net

Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 offers an all-in-one firewall and caching solution that’s significantly more complete and competitive than its predecessor Proxy Server 2.0. (See “Comet Becomes Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000” on page 9 of the July 2000 Update.)

ISA Server was released Feb. 14 in two editions, Standard and Enterprise. The most important difference between the two editions concerns the configuration of multiple ISA Servers with Active Directory, Windows 2000’s built-in directory service. ISA Enterprise simplifies configuration by letting administrators define security policies in Active Directory that span multiple ISA Servers. These policies can be either limited to an array of ISA Servers or applied globally to all ISA Servers in an organization. Once these policies are defined and stored in Active Directory, administrators can easily add more ISA Servers without having to re-create the rules on the new servers. With ISA Standard, in contrast, administrators must configure policies on each server. ISA Standard Edition also supports no more than four processors per server, while ISA Enterprise can support up to 32 processors (on Windows 2000 Datacenter Server).