Citrix NetScaler Gives Servers, Planet A Break

If it's true that spam is killing the planet, then Twitter is one of its henchmen. And so are Flash, Flex, Ajax, AIR, Silverlight -- they're all soldiers in a zombie army of Watt-chompers.Call me an accessory to the crime. It's my dependence on the Web 2.0 technologies that constantly push their delicious interactive data and rich Internet apps to the Web that's melting the polar caps. While I'm clicking from site to site, and client to client, these apps are perniciously consuming power on one end while spewing greenhouse gasses out the other.

It's called server sprawl, this round-the-clock piping hot server processing capacity. And it's neither pretty, nor cheap. It severely taxes data center resources and can hamper performance and scalability, leaving servers chugging and wheezing under the strain.

But there may be a way to tamp down the engines of always-on Internet goodness.

This week, Citrix Systems announced it has developed new capabilities for its Citrix NetScaler Web application delivery system. NetScaler is the first application delivery controller to streamline this process by 'pushing' data directly to thousands of users concurrently, bypassing servers.

"The Citrix NetScaler Web 2.0 software adds publish and subscribe capabilities to NetScaler. That allows NetScaler to off-load the application connections from the servers, making it easier to pool server resources and reduce the number of needed servers," writes Rick Whiting in ChannelWeb.

Server costs can be reduced by up to 90 percent by decreasing power, cooling, and operational overhead, the company said in a statement.

What tree-hugging, eco-friendly spammer wouldn't love that?