Power Efficient Secure Web Servers

The power consumption of web servers and associated security devices is becoming an increasing issue both from an economic and environmental perspective. This paper analyses the power consumption of both security software and web server software and concludes that traditional architectures waste energy with repeated transitions up and down the TCP/IP stack. This contention is proved by comparing the energy usage of a traditional architecture and a new architecture whereby IDS functionality is moved into the web server and all operations share HTTP packets. Based on these findings we propose a novel alternative power efficient architecture for web servers that may also be usable in other network systems.