Eric,
To estimate how BorderManager can improve network throughput and/or efficiency, you have to look at how it is being used (to cache outbound requests from users on a corporate network, or to cache inbound requests from public users). All of this is only looking at the proxy caching capabilities of BorderManager.
In the first case, assuming that most corporate users access the same sites and the same data, BorderManager would keep a copy of the data locally on the network. On an Ethernet network, this means that users could access the data at 10Mbps, vs. the maximum 1.5Mbps available on a T1 line. There would also be a substantial decrease in access times, since the data would be relatively local, and not have to pass through numerous Internet routers, long distances, probability of different packet fragments taking different routes resulting in reassembly delays, and on and on. In this scenario, improvements of 5-10X in "apparent" responsiveness seems like it would be common.
BorderManager caches the most frequently and recently used data in memory, and less frequently and recently used data on disk. Since NetWare is a very efficient data pump, even data stored on disk would be served to users much faster than having to go to the original source.
The benefits are obviously greater with relatively static web pages. Even on dynamically updated web pages, however, most of the data that needs to be transferred is often static: things like banners, graphics, etc. Since these have their own unique url's, the graphics could often be served out of the BorderManager cache while the textual data is retrieved from the distant web server.
The case study Novell published focuses on the second case: caching inbound requests from public users to a corporate web site. In this case, the primary benefit is to relieve most (90%) of the load from the web server, allowing hardware and software that is cheaper both to purchase and maintain to serve a larger number of users.
Novell's main corporate web site is run on three Compaq Proliant 4500 server running UnixWare and Apache. It was getting pretty bogged down as the hits per day climbed from 1 million towards 3 million. They now estimate they can handle 40 million hits per day with the same hardware and software. The capacity should even increase when they do the planned change to IntraNetWare and NetScape Enterprise Server.
The main competitive commercial products for this capability are MS's Proxy Server running on NT, and Netscape's Proxy Server which runs on NT or various Unix systems. There are several freeware proxy servers for various OS's, as well. Given the well-known networking and file serving performance issues of NT and Unix vs. NetWare, I doubt that any proxy software running on these OS's on similar hardware could come close to the performance of BorderManager. Of course, you can always put in some humongous Unix system that will beat the performance of a given BorderManager configuration, but the costs will escalate very rapidly.
None of this touches on the other capabilities of BorderManager such as content filtering, site blocking, usage logging, NDS-based security, virtual private networking with full encryption, etc.
The only issue I can see with BorderManager is that some potential customers may balk at the cost, especially if they don't require some of the NDS security features. Maybe we'll see a BorderManager "Lite" in the future, or a few of the features bundled into Multi-Protocol Router (which is already bundled into IntraNetWare).
Jerry |
