10/13/2008 -- Cisco Systems Inc.'s IronPort subsidiary last week announced enhancements to its IronPort C-Series and IronPort X-Series security gateways, along with a new management appliance, the IronPort M-Series.

IronPort says the enhanced offerings boast better performance and throughput than competitive offerings -- and are faster than their IronPort predecessors, to boot. All told, it announced the C360, C660 and X1060 e-mail security appliances, along with the M660 and M1060 management appliances. The IronPort C360 supports between 1,000 and 10,000 users, while its bigger brother -- the C660 -- can scale to support 10,000 or more users.

Both appliances are targeted at enterprise customers, with the C660 obviously slated for large enterprise shops. IronPort's X1060, on the other hand, scales to support hundreds of thousands of users. It's designed for carriers, service providers and other demanding network environments. (The IronPort C-Series line is anchored by the diminutive C-150, which supports less than 1,000 users. It's designed for SMBs and small enterprises, according to officials.)

On the management side, IronPort's new M660 appliance is designed to support environments with multiple e-mail gateway appliances and thousands (or tens of thousands) of users. Similarly, the behemoth M1060 is aimed at service providers, carriers and other high-end customers. Both the new C-Series and X-Series appliances, as well as the M660 and M1060 management devices, are available now, IronPort said.

Currently, market watcher IDC ranks IronPort as the world's largest provider of e-mail security appliances. Officials claim that IronPort's offerings now safeguard more than 200 million mailboxes.

"IronPort has long been a leader in e-mail security," said Tom Gillis, vice president of marketing for Cisco, in a release. "Now that IronPort is part of Cisco, we have been able to break further away from the pack. Our solutions and our pace of innovation help our customers remain protected against rapidly changing Internet threats. Our latest hardware releases are a great example of our ability to significantly raise the bar for e-mail performance while extending our leadership position for anti-spam accuracy." --Stephen Swoyer