IronPort Systems on Tuesday announced a high-performance model in its family of e-mail security appliances designed for high-volume enterprises and ISPs.

The X1050, available now, offers more than 400 percent greater processing power than IronPort's existing high-end appliance, according to company officials. This performance boost will allow enterprises and ISPs that send and receive large amounts of e-mail to deal with the growing volumes of spam without having to add hardware, they say. The new appliance was announced at the Gartner IT Security Summit held this week.

During the second half of 2006, IronPort saw spam volumes more than triple, as compared with the levels reached in 2005, and these volumes show no signs of slowing in 2007. The more spam sent, the longer it takes legitimate e-mail to reach in-boxes because antispam filters and other techniques have more messages to sift through, they say.

IronPort's new X1050 can process more than 2.5 million messages per hour, employing both antispam and antivirus protection. With the advantage of more processing power, the appliance can apply more advanced spam-filtering algorithms to each inbound message, further cutting back on the amount of spam that lands in customers' in-boxes, officials say.

The X1050 starts at US$75,000.

In January Cisco announced plans to acquire IronPort. The deal is expected to close later this month.