5/27/2008 -- Enterprise server vendors have long been hip to the importance (at least when it comes to marketing) of reducing datacenter power and cooling costs. Networking vendors have been less voluble on this tip, however, in spite of the fact that networking gear -- with rack upon rack of power hungry ports -- could use a little greening itself.

Cisco Systems Inc. last week sought to amplify just this message, touting the Green IT bona-fides of its IronPort spam and malware protection devices.

The basic upshot, according to Cisco, is that IronPort does more -- with a smaller footprint, to boot -- than competitive alternatives. This results in higher density, fewer devices, reduced power consumption (both with respect to the IronPort devices themselves and on the datacenter cooling tip) and a smaller overall datacenter footprint. And with spam and malware threat levels continuing to climb, the "Green" bona-fides of prospective malware-busting appliances also need to be taken into account, experts argue.

"Effective spam tools protect email resources, but these engines still require scaling to deal with growing spam volumes," said Peter Christy, founder of consultancy Internet Research Group, in a statement distributed by Cisco. "IronPort's purpose-engineered mail processors deliver significantly more throughput than competitive alternatives; that translates into fewer spam servers and reduced power and space requirements. This benefit is compounded by IronPort's effective reputation services, which drop most of the spam traffic at the network connection level before the spam engines need to process it."

The upshot, Christy argued, is a greener overall value proposition from IronPort and Cisco. "On balance, IronPort delivers leading spam mitigation per joule of energy invested, an attribute of growing importance as both spam volumes and energy prices continue to rise unabated," he concluded. --Stephen Swoyer