CacheMARA Key Features Overview
Proxy Modes
CacheMARA supports both transparent and non-transparent proxy modes.
In a transparent setup, the cache intercepts all network traffic transparently to the clients. Users don't have to configure the proxy to be granted access to the internet. At the same time users have to use the cache proxy and are not able to circumvent it. A non-transparent setup is of special interest for companies, enabling internet access rules on a per user/usergroup basis. CacheMARA supports user and group authentication through industry-standard authentication methods. Among the supported methods are
- MS Active Directory with/without single-sign-on
- NT Domain
- LDAP
- Digest LDAP
By using CacheMARA in your company you can control your used bandwidth by setting up bandwidth limitation. Limits can be set globally, for the whole company, per subnet and in case of a non-transparent setup per user. In order to optimize traffic flow, CacheMARA also supports persistent connections to origin servers and clients. Only one connection is created for multiple requests of the same user or to the same origin server. Therefore the available connection limit can be used optimally to be able to serve a larger amount of users.
Access Controls
CacheMARA provides an easy and flexible way of regulating access to the internet. By setting up access control rules the access policy can be managed and implemented as fine-grained as needed. Rules can be based on
- a simple or complex source type (client IP, IP ranges, networks and any combination of it)
- user groups and single users
- IP- and domain destinations, as well as regular expressions for destinations
- mime types
- browsers (via the user-agent tag)
- schedules
Besides single values, CacheMARA supports group based access control which enables a more complex setup with less access rules. Different single values (e.g. destinations) can be combined to a group, which then can be used as part of an access control rule. In general, rules can allow and block internet access. This decision can also be made on custom Blue Coat policies that can be created if the optional content filtering is licensed.
Content Filtering
MARA Systems' partnership with Blue Coat enables us to provide our cache proxies with the world's leading content filtering software WebFilter.
Additionally CacheMARA improves overall filtering performance by caching WebFilter's rating responses. Read more about CacheMARA's unique integration of Webfilter
here.
Management GUI
CacheMARA is delivered with an innovative web management Graphical User Interface which uses one of the latest web technologies available (Adobe Flex). It is optimized to provide best usability and user guidance. All available features are delivered with sophisticated default settings and can be changed within a few steps. Even more complex scenarios can be set up and maintained with little effort, allowing to save administration costs.
Administrators access the GUI via a web browser using the HTTPS protocol. Besides configuring and maintaining the appliance, all core features are supplied with convincing live statistics. For advanced analysis purposes all statistics are additionally delivered with different granularity. Currently provided are statistics of the last day, last month and last year. In order to provide full transparency all log files created by CacheMARAs core features can be accessed through the management GUI.
For user convenience, all parts of the management GUI are offering multi-language support. Currently featured languages are English, German, Spanish, French and Chinese. Languages can be switched directly in the GUI without having to install a different version or restarting the software. Online updates keep your cache cluster up-to-date, enabling you to benefit from the latest improvements.
High Availability
While more and more services become web-based, a reliable internet connection is a key factor for a working company. A hardware failure of a single proxy cache would lead to total breakdown, as users' internet access would be denied to all users. Servers with running web applications that rely on a reliable connection would be offline which is equivalent to a denial-of-service. Such breakdowns can cost massive amounts of money and prevent the company from working.
In order to ensure a reliable service, CacheMARA supports a high availability setup. A second cache appliance, configured as backup, takes over in case of a hardware failure to preserve all functionality and internet connectivity.
Access Logging
Flexible log data facilities are supplied to monitor access to the cache. CacheMARA provides several log formats, e.g. Squid, Squidmime, Apache combined and custom log formats. In addition to this, syslog support enables logging to remote servers. The main benefit of using one or more dedicated syslog servers is that the cache appliance is freed form load and thus more disk-space is available for caching. By setting up a dedicated syslog server, more hard-disks can be used, which ensures storage of access log data for a longer period of time.
WCCP Support
WCCP is a content-routing protocol developed by Cisco that provides a method to redirect traffic flows in real-time.
It features load balancing, fault tolerance, scaling and service-assurance mechanisms. Furthermore it enables transparent caching with a WCCP-compliant router using Layer2 rewriting or IP-GRE encapsulation.
CacheMARA supports both protocol versions v1 and v2.
Cache Hierarchy
Cache hierarchies provide an easy way of load balancing. By setting up one or more parent proxies in front of your cache proxy, load balancing can be done based on the client IP, authenticated user name or simply by a round-robin distribution. Even a firewall can be set up as parent peer to deny the proxy's direct access to the internet.