GoodMail has a certified email paper suppression solution.

CertifiedEmail Paper Suppression (CertifiedEmail PS) is the first application designed to provide legal proof that a specific email message was sent and received at the server-level email inbox. Built on the CertifiedEmail platform, CertifiedEmail PS enables a business to prove that a given message was sent and delivered on a specified day, to a specific recipient. A digital signature technology validates the exact contents of the message. This nonrepudiation capability provides a means for companies to meet regulatory compliance while doing so with electronic means instead of paper notifications, saving money while compressing the consumer notice period.

CertifiedEmail PS may meet regulatory compliance obligations, including Regulation Z, Sarbanes-Oxley and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

The product has the following green benefits.

Cut costs of paper processing & postal delivery of certain customer communications with regulatory compliance or other special needs

Paper based notices cost between $0.35 and $1.50 to process, vs. $0.03 for CertifiedEmail PS

Consumer notifications arrive faster, contracting the timeline for regulated consumer processes such as collections, service actions, etc.

Reduce waste.  1 ream of paper (500 sheets) costs $0.80, 5 lbs. of CO2 and 6% of a tree.  (Source: www.whatsyourwedge.com)

I am going to spend more time thinking about this product and researching the issues.

The company just got a new CEO hire, Peter Horan from InterActive Media who is going to address advertising scenarios.

Media and Advertising Veteran Peter Horan Joins Goodmail as Chief Executive Officer

New CEO Will Spearhead First Advertising Platform for the Inbox

• For Marketers: What is CertifiedEmail?
• Who accepts CertifiedEmail?
• CertifiedEmail service providers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 19, 2008 - Goodmail Systems, creator of CertifiedEmail™, the industry’s standard for trusted email, today announced Peter Horan as its new chief executive officer.  With over two decades of media and advertising industry leadership, Horan comes to Goodmail from IAC Media and Advertising, where as CEO he oversaw more than $250 million in advertising and commerce revenue from Evite, Pronto, IAC Mobile and Ask Sponsored Listings.  He will bring to the company a level of unmatched experience and vision as Goodmail extends the CertifiedEmail platform for trusted consumer email to offer true “Email 2.0” advertising solutions for top brands and direct marketers.

“CertifiedEmail is quickly becoming a best practice for top email marketers. Goodmail sent more than 1.6 billion CertifiedEmail messages in the month of April alone,” said Horan. “The ability to deliver safe and legitimate email messages to consumers not only provides immediate return for senders today, it creates a platform upon which exciting new inbox-based advertising products can be introduced. Most importantly, CertifiedEmail actually improves consumers’ trust in email right now and makes it easier for them to spot messages they want.”

Horan has experience in both startups and large companies. He served as the CEO of Allbusiness.com (now part of Dun & Bradstreet), About.com (now part of the New York Times) and DevX.com (now part of Jupitermedia).  Previously he spent 10 years in publishing at International Data Group, serving as SVP and Publisher of Computerworld, and also worked for 15 years in senior account management roles at Ogilvy & Mather and BBDO.

“Peter has a proven track record pioneering new advertising platforms and creating innovative ways of driving online consumer engagement,” said Daniel Dreymann, president and co-founder of Goodmail. “His leadership, ambition and creative instincts make him the perfect person to lead Goodmail’s management team and build out the capabilities of the CertifiedEmail platform.”   

Horan will lead the introduction of Goodmail’s new advertising platform for the inbox, leveraging the company’s unique CertifiedEmail service, which has been adopted by seven of the nation’s top 10 email mailbox providers, and is in use by over 500 commercial brands and 200 government agencies and nonprofits.  He will work closely with Dreymann who had previously served as CEO.

Found this article in echannelline.com which is one of the first I’ve seen discussing the ideas of Green and Security in the same article.

Security platform provider Crossbeam Systems has waded into the Green IT discussion by releasing a white paper outlining steps that CIOs can take to achieve more efficient data centers by reducing the energy consumption of security-related equipment through the adoption of virtualization.

"Security has been a particularly egregious contributor to increasing data center energy consumption," said Peter Doggart, Crossbeam's Director of Product Marketing and the author of the white paper. "The good news is that the advances in security virtualization that Crossbeam has pioneered are helping customers consolidate their security-related hardware on the order of 20-to-one. The dramatic savings, ease of management and reduction of energy benefits to be realized resonate strongly among IT organizations."

The marketing document is kind of an advertorial format, but has some interesting parts like Green Data Center can be achieved by consolidating network security services into fewer devices as there have been device sprawl in the data center.

In the traditional, non-virtualized environment, companies address their
security issues by deploying special-purpose appliances built to run a
host of security applications, from firewalls and content gateways to IDS
devices and URL filters. Connecting this array of appliances is an excess
of additional switching equipment, patch cabling, and load balancers.
In this environment, network security has been in favor of the security
vendors, with their response to each new threat being, “Have I got a box
for you, and by the way, you are going to need a lot of them.”
The good news is there are numerous innovative companies focusing on
a particular security threat area. That focus is a big plus for customers.
The downside is that these focused companies typically require that
another box be added in order to deploy their solution. The requirement
for redundancy and ever-increasing traffic demands accelerate growth
in the number of appliances deployed. This phenomenon is known as
“appliance sprawl”
Appliance sprawl yields extraordinarily complex data center architectures,
leading to wasted space, growing energy usage, and difficulty in fault
diagnosis. Moreover, because these devices require connections to
Layer 2 and 3 network switches plus load balancers, and have limited
networking and application processing power, they essentially become
embedded, single-purpose elements in the network. This means that
when the security services need to be expanded or upgraded, so
does the network – an expensive and inefficient use of IT and security
resources.

This article did server another purpose to remind to contact Guy Brunsdon, giving us an excuse to talk technical stuff while our wives watch the kids. Guy and I get along even though he is Nikon user and I am a Canon dSLR user.

Technical Marketing Director, VMware

Guy Brunsdon is responsible for Technical Marketing of Networking for VMware Infrastructure at VMware. Prior to VMware he spent eight years at Cisco Systems in Australia and the United States in a variety of technical marketing and product marketing roles. Most recently he was responsible for product marketing of the Catalyst product lines in High Performance Computing. Prior to Cisco, Guy was Chief Network Architect for the Telstra enterprise network in Australia. Guy currently resides in Bellevue, WA.

Here is blog post about one of Guy’s presentations.

Today I've started attending Guy Brunsdon speech about best practice in configuring networking.
He started with basic on vSwitch telling that they behave as layer 2 physical switch (so no layer 3 routing).
He put strike on the importance of having network teaming to achieve:

• better use of bandwidth
• enhanced availability and performance

Another important feature to be used is VLAN tagging (that implies 802.1Q hardware), moreover in case of Virtual infrastructure deployed on blade system with lack of the ports.

Greening of a network while meeting security SLAs requires a focus on efficiency and cost effectiveness, and i know Guy would be a great resource on this.