Sunbelt Software is probably best-known as a pioneering anti-spyware vendor, but they have made network security products for many years as well. Their specialty is products to secure and enhance Microsoft Exchange. I have used their Ninja e-mail security product here on my network for many years.

Now they have made Ninja into an appliance product with Ninja Blade, through a partnership with Dell. These 1U rack units have a variety of hardware configurations that Sunbelt rates with user capacity of 500 up to 5000. The low-end unit starts at $1,995.

Ninja Blade, like Ninja, uses multiple anti-spam engines to block unwanted e-mail. BitDefender anti-virus scrubs e-mail of malware, and flexible attachment filtering allows administrators to stop or allow files as they see fit.

Exchange sites may be able to look at a solution like Ninja Blade as an upgrade to their existing server, if it replaces security software running on that server. Not only will the load be separated from the server system, but the amount of e-mail coming into the Exchange server will decrease by all of the spam and malware blocked by Ninja.