Educational networks turn to Arbor for infrastructure security

Arbor Networks, a leader in network integrity systems, announced today that several large educational networks have selected Arbor's Peakflow SP solutions. The educational networks using Peakflow SP are taking advantage of the platform's diverse capabilities - detection and mitigation of devastating denial of service attacks, dynamically measuring and visualizing their networks, and aiding with inter-departmental billing. Arbor Networks will be showcasing Peakflow SP at the Fall Internet2 Member Meeting, Sept. 28-29 at the Hilton Austin in Austin, Texas. For details, go to: http://events.internet2.edu/2004/fall-mm/demos.html#traffic Arbor Networks' newest customers and expanded deployments, which range in size from the largest nation-wide backbone network to individual university systems, include: -- Abilene Network -- Harvard University -- Merit Network -- University of Pennsylvania "We use Peakflow SP daily to track and respond to distributed denial of service attacks on the Abilene backbone network," said Greg Travis, the associate director of the Advanced Network Management Lab at Indiana University, the global Network Operation Center for Internet2's Abilene Network. "Peakflow SP is invaluable to our mission as the host of the Abilene NOC." Education networks, which have high bandwidth access and are often more open to the public Internet than corporate networks, are prime targets for denial of service attacks, hackers exploiting system vulnerabilities, and self propagating worms. With tens of thousands of hosts in their domain, network operators can find it difficult to monitor every single host connected to a university network. While security remains a key priority for these network providers, it can be challenging to identify and mitigate attacks or anomalous behavior without compromising day-to-day operations in an educational network designed to be as open as possible. "Arbor's Peakflow SP solves the many networking security and operational problems for large educational and university network administrators," said Dr. Farnam Jahanian, founder and chairman of Arbor Networks. "The larger networks are using Peakflow SP to protect their clients - school districts, colleges, and universities - from Internet attacks. Others are using Peakflow SP to ensure HIPAA compliance or to provide a network-wide view of their operations to manage traffic and routing and provide inter-departmental usage data for billing." "MichNet was America's first regional research and education network. Our system supports the high-performance networking needs of Michigan's universities, K-12 schools, community colleges, libraries, state government, health care, and other non-profit organizations," said Hunt Williams, president of Merit Network. "We have had a long and productive partnership with Arbor Networks; Arbor's Peakflow SP has been deployed in MichNet for almost four years to protect our statewide network and we have recently expanded our relationship." The University of Pennsylvania carries on the principles and spirit of its founder, Benjamin Franklin whose practical outlook has remained a driving force in the university's development. "At the University of Pennsylvania, we needed a practical solution to protect us from incoming DDoS attacks that significantly impede the performance of our network," said Michael Palladino, associate vice president of networks at the University of Pennsylvania. "Arbor's Peakflow SP has given us the tools to identify and mitigate these attacks and to optimize network performance."