The opportunity to save money is widening the appeal of green IT, researchers say.

Most recently, research firm IDC polled IT executives who registered for its Green IT Forum and found 68% rated energy efficiency as "top of mind" when thinking about green IT. Another 51% said their organization's approach to green was directly tied to the cost savings it could provide.

As power consumption begins to play a bigger role in enterprise product selection, more IT vendors -- including some in the network optimization arena -- are working to emphasize their products’ energy savings potential. For example, Array Networks last year said its AppVelocity series of application delivery controllers uses 60% less power than other products.

This week A10 Networks is highlighting the energy-saving "green" form factor of its newest server load balancer, unveiled Monday.

The AX 1000 is a new entry-level model in the vendor’s AX Series Advanced Traffic Manager family. Its maximum power consumption is 158 watts when all ports are running traffic concurrently -- which is up to 45% less power than many competitors' products consume, A10 claims.

The 1U load balancer offers SSL acceleration, RAM caching, HTTP compression, global server load balancing, and packet inspection capabilities, among other features. The AX 1000 also supports aXAPI, a REST (Representational State Transfer)-based XML API that’s designed to make it easier for administrators to tie their AX appliances to in-house and other third-party applications.

"One of the key challenges with ensuring acceptable application delivery is that in the vast majority of instances the end user, and not the IT organization, first notices application degradation," analyst Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates said in a statement. "With the introduction of the AX 1000, A10 is addressing this issue head on with high performance in a highly affordable application delivery platform, lowering the barrier of entry to ensure enterprise-wide applications can be delivered properly."

The AX 1000 is available today.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.