All Cisco IronPort
appliances are built from the ground up and are powered by the
unique Cisco IronPort AsyncOS® operating system for high performance
and security. Designed to meet the inbound and outbound needs
of the world’s largest email infrastructures, Cisco IronPort
appliances offer advanced mail delivery features such as:
- Comprehensive queue management
- Bounce handling
- Connection management
These features help ensure that email infrastructure is never
overwhelmed, even during the largest virus outbreaks or spam
attacks. They also save money on hardware, rack space, power,
and IT administration time.
Developing the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS Operating System
Cisco started with a FreeBSD kernel and made three major
changes:
- Developing a stackless threading model that allows the
Cisco IronPort appliance to support more than 10,000 simultaneous
connections. A traditional operating system supports only
100 connections.
- Creating a high-performance file system and an I/O-driven
scheduler optimized for the asynchronous nature of messaging
(where the “Async”OS name came from).
- Designing the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS operating system
to have no user-accessible UNIX shell. This feature makes
the system inherently highly secure and much simpler to
administer. Users interact with a web-based GUI or fully-scriptable
command-line interface.
The Cisco IronPort AsyncOS operating system lets Cisco IronPort
appliances process mail more than 10 times more efficiently
than traditional UNIX systems do, providing extremely high capacity
and availability. |
