Volera Helps Nation's Educators Manage and Accelerate Congested Web Networks.

Business Editors and High-Tech/Education Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 16, 2001

Technology Enables Compliance with Government Mandated Content

Filtering; Offers Taxpayer Savings and Reduced Network Costs

Volera Inc., the leading provider of content networking solutions and a subsidiary of Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ: NOVL), today announced the successful deployments of the company's Excelerator(TM) technology in a number of high profile education systems across the U.S. School administrators, grappling with increasing information technology costs and regulation, have embraced Volera's technology as a way to manage costs, save public and private dollars, improve Web performance and successfully integrate with government-mandated Internet content filtering requirements.

The most recent examples of Volera's success in the education marketplace include technology deployments across the Fulton County School District in Atlanta, Georgia; North Texas University in Dallas, Texas; and the Utah Education Network.

"We are providing an intelligent caching and content networking solution to educational institutions, from large state universities and regional school districts to small private institutions," said Simon Khalaf, president of Volera. "Volera's Excelerator empowers system administrators to comply with the new government mandate and maximize Internet performance and reduce costs -- and it pays for itself in about three months."

Fulton County Schools

Fulton County Schools, the largest district in the state of Georgia, boasts more than 75 schools and administrative locations. The district's complicated and expensive network infrastructure faces a constant demand for Web access while complying with new content filtering requirements. "Internet traffic was choking our network to death," states Kenny Wilder, network administrator at Fulton County.

To keep up with the demand of more than 68,000 student users, Fulton County was faced with adding additional T-1 lines at a significant, recurring cost. To maximize its existing investment, the district selected the power, speed, scalability and reliability of Volera's Excelerator. "Last year it was almost futile to try to surf the Internet around noon, but now we don't see any sluggishness," explains Wilder.

As a complete content networking platform, Excelerator provides rapid deployment and delivery of a variety of Internet services, including content filtering, media delivery and online security. With this in mind, Fulton County took advantage of Excelerator's ability to deliver accelerated content filtering. "Excelerator is the powerful engine running our filtering software, which also helps us to cut down on unnecessary network traffic," said Wilder.

University of North Texas

The University of North Texas, tasked with managing more than 10,000 computers and the needs of 27,000 students, faces a constant demand for quality Internet access from faculty, staff and students alike. "It has been a continuous uphill battle to keep a pipe to the Internet large enough to satisfy demand," states Allen Bradley, manager of Campus-Wide Networks.

When student dorms were originally outfitted with Internet access, "we couldn't add T-1 lines fast enough," says Bradley. "But as soon as we put Excelerator in, we felt an immediate benefit." Since more than 50% of the Web content being used by the University population was cacheable by Excelerator, the majority of its Web traffic no longer had to venture outside the university's infrastructure. "Excelerator makes bandwidth available to your users," Bradley says. "We don't have to keep adding more T-1 lines or another DS3."

Utah Education Network

The Utah Education Network delivers resources to the state of Utah's entire education community, with operations including a data network, two public TV stations, and a statewide analog video-conferencing network. With more than half a million users and Internet traffic that quadruples each year, the Utah Education Network (UEN) counts on Volera Excelerator to deliver high-speed Internet access that scales well ahead of their explosive growth.

Scalable performance is one of the main reasons the UEN chose Volera. As they continue to experience dramatic increases in Internet traffic each year, they don't see themselves topping out anytime soon. "Excelerator buys us a ton of scalability", says Don Porter, senior network engineer for the UEN.

Volera Excelerator also allows the UEN to offer content filtering as part of the service they provide to the school districts. Since the K-12 schools are their primary customers for content filtering, they have very strict needs. "We do a lot of work in selecting our filter list," Porter says. "Volera gives me the horsepower to use a much better list than I could use otherwise."

Volera Excelerator(TM)

Excelerator 2.0 is available as an integrated technology through Nortel Networks and the top 10 server manufactures, including, IBM, Dell, NEC, Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu-Siemens, Stratacache, Microbits, DICA and Legend. The 2.0 product can also be purchased as an upgrade to existing Excelerator-powered appliances either through Volera's OEM partners or directly from Volera.

Volera customers praise Excelerator for its ease of installation. "Installation is very easy," says Fulton County's Wilder. "Our technicians take them out of the box, assign them an IP address, and plug them in. After that we simply set our router to reroute HTTP traffic to them and we're done. It might take 15 minutes to install Excelerator." Wilder goes on to say, "driving across the county to get to one of our schools is the longest part of the process!"

About Volera

Volera, Inc. is transforming today's Internet into a fast, scalable and reliable business tool by providing Web hosting companies, Internet service providers (ISPs) and the enterprise with a comprehensive solution for managing the intelligent, efficient delivery of content. Volera's full suite of content networking products enables its customers to accelerate the flow of data and inject extraordinary control over the delivery and management of content, rich and streaming media, secure data and countless Web-based applications. Volera's core technology is the Excelerator 2.0 platform; the fastest Internet caching technology in the industry based on third party testing. Volera Inc. is a subsidiary of Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ: NOVL) with a strategic investment from Nortel Networks and equity participation from Accenture. More information on Volera can be found at http://www.volera.com.