Secure, reliable, shared Internet access

Business centres are obvious canditates for reaping the benfits of shared
Internet access. Business centres should expect to be able to Install a high
quality Leased Line Internet connection, and subdivide it amongst the tenants.
Economies of scale should ensure that each tenant has access to a higher
quality connection that he could have secured for himself at the same cost.
This proposition does however come with its own set of problems.

The first problem is one of security. Tenants need to be secured against threats
from the Internet and from threats originating on the Local Area Network (LAN).
If tenants are not properly segregated from one another, worms, viruses and
hackers can roam unchecked on the LAN, infecting machines and possibly
destroying valuable data.

In addition to the security issue, there is also the matter of Quality of Service (QoS). With multiple tenants competing for a limited resource, such as Internet Bandwidth, applications can be harmed to the point that they become unusable. Applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP), Citrix or Terminal Services are very sensitive to network congestion and packet-loss. One tenant running a file sharing application such as Kazaa, or eDonkey coudl easily use enough bandwidth to render these other applications useless.

Netserver's FireRack has the solution to these problems. It been designed to segment, secure and police networks such as this. FireRack enables Business Centres to offer their tenants the benefits of shared Leased Line based Internet connections, with a Quality of Service guarantee.

For more information, please take a look at the following documents:

FireRack Application Note for MTU	Adobe Acrobat PDF (62KB)
FireRack MTU Overview	PowerPoint Presentation (152KB)