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IronPort on Tuesday announced a high-performance addition to its family of e-mail security appliances as well as an upgrade to its Web security box that adds URL filtering.

Announced at the RSA Conference `07, the IronPort C650 e-mail security appliance is designed for large enterprises with hardware tweaks that double the message-scanning throughput offered by the company’s existing products, according to officials at the company, which Cisco in January announced plans to acquire for $830 million.

This performance enhancement will help the appliance more quickly execute new spam-detecting techniques – such as filtering for image-based spam -- that can be computationally intensive, the company says.

The volume of spam received by the average company has grown significantly over the past year, causing queue backups and delayed delivery of e-mail, officials say. With the new appliance, enterprises can employ IronPort’s spam-catching techniques including its reputation filters and Context Adaptive Scanning Engine without experiencing performance hits, they say.

The IronPort C650 is priced at $64,950.

Also at the RSA Conference on Tuesday IronPort introduced an upgrade to its S-Series Web security appliance, adding URL filtering to its existing techniques for blocking Internet threats that include reputation filtering and malware filtering, according to officials.

The upgraded appliance will block employees from visiting Web sites that are deemed suspicious or inappropriate based on a database containing information on 21 million sites. This database is continuously updated, with more than 100,000 new sites added every week, they say.

Administrators can use the appliance’s existing Web Security Manager to set up policies related to URL filtering.

Also with this release, IronPort has enhanced the performance of its Dynamic Vectoring and Streaming engine that integrates Webroot Software’s technology to scan for malware, officials say.

The IronPort S-Series is priced starting at $24,950.

Separately, IronPort last week announced an upgrade to its Context Adaptive Scanning Engine (CASE) that powers its Anti-Spam filters. CASE 2.0 is designed to block “rapid start” spam attacks, in which an army of compromised PCs launch spam blasts for a few hours and finish the job before filters can be updated to catch them, officials say.