Novell, a leading provider of directory-enabled networking software, last week pledged to donate 10 internet caching systems running on Compaq caching appliance servers to the Internet2 project (I2). Compaq, too is making a similar donation of 10 dedicated caching appliances.

The I2 project is a joint effort of university, government and industry partners who are building the next generation of the internet. With the potential to increase the speed and capacity of its web servers 10-fold, the I2 project will benefit from dramatic improvements in server speed and efficiency, increased information access speeds and lower telecom costs to Net users worldwide.

Just as today's internet arose from the academic and federal research networks of the 1980s, the I2 project is helping to develop and test the nextgeneration of internet technologies in a pre-commercial setting. The 10-donated Compaq caching server appliances running Novell's ICS will be deployed as part of I2's distributed storage initiative.

The I2 project will allow replication of content across multiple servers, and provide users with transparent access to that content at their chosen cost and performance point.

The project is building leading-edge network capabilities to enable the next generation of internet applications and caching will be an important part of internet's future. Internet2 is led by more than 150 US research universities which are part of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development.

Novell ICS is a scalable, plug-and-accelerate caching appliance architecture available for license by Intel architecture-based OEMs. With its new cache object store, it dramatically improves the speed and efficiency of delivering internet content. Novell claims it can accelerate any website up to 10-fold as against theperformance of ordinary web servers, host over 100,000 persistent connections and dramatically reduce the hassle and expense of scaling traffic across multiple web servers.