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Anyone use a Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall 100?
- Thread starter spotdog14
- Start date
We have many Barracuda spam firewalls in the field including one single model 100. They do an excellent job with blocking spam, but they are not without drawbacks. Namely:
1) Their hardware is junk on the 100 and 200 series. Think AMD geode processors and regular non-enterprise SATA disks. For the most part, it's consumer grade desktop hardware (The older 200 series used Sempron processors, which is okay, but the motherboards looked like desktop ECS boards) It seems they even use refurbished hardware and sell it as new. We've had a new Barracuda Message Archiver come with refurbished Seagate SATA drives (one of which died and needed to be replaced, which is how we found out it was refurbished from the start).
2) The web interfaces are VERY S L O W. On a 200 it takes a good 60 - 90 seconds to navigate around the message log. There are many other people on the barracuda forums that have the same issue.
3) If you expect to have ANY form of support when your unit dies (and it will die) then you need to purchase their "instant replacement". This is probably my biggest gripe with them. Even though you pay for updates and technical support you don't get hardware support. If your unit dies and you do not have "instant replacement" they will tell you it will take up to 90 days to get your unit fixed. The alternative is to *retroactively* pay them for instant replacement support. On a unit that is a few years old, that's easily $1500 - $2000 - the cost of a new unit.
4) We have four dead Barracuda products sitting on our shelves right now. Two 200 series spam filters and two 210 series web filters. They have all died (bad motherboards it looks like) and Barracuda wanted over $1800 in retroactive instant replacement fees on top of the $500/year our client already pays for energizer updates. It didn't make any sense for them to pay so much money so they went with other products.
So, I guess other than managing them and needing support from Barracuda Networks they do a very good job at blocking spam.
Riley
1) Their hardware is junk on the 100 and 200 series. Think AMD geode processors and regular non-enterprise SATA disks. For the most part, it's consumer grade desktop hardware (The older 200 series used Sempron processors, which is okay, but the motherboards looked like desktop ECS boards) It seems they even use refurbished hardware and sell it as new. We've had a new Barracuda Message Archiver come with refurbished Seagate SATA drives (one of which died and needed to be replaced, which is how we found out it was refurbished from the start).
2) The web interfaces are VERY S L O W. On a 200 it takes a good 60 - 90 seconds to navigate around the message log. There are many other people on the barracuda forums that have the same issue.
3) If you expect to have ANY form of support when your unit dies (and it will die) then you need to purchase their "instant replacement". This is probably my biggest gripe with them. Even though you pay for updates and technical support you don't get hardware support. If your unit dies and you do not have "instant replacement" they will tell you it will take up to 90 days to get your unit fixed. The alternative is to *retroactively* pay them for instant replacement support. On a unit that is a few years old, that's easily $1500 - $2000 - the cost of a new unit.
4) We have four dead Barracuda products sitting on our shelves right now. Two 200 series spam filters and two 210 series web filters. They have all died (bad motherboards it looks like) and Barracuda wanted over $1800 in retroactive instant replacement fees on top of the $500/year our client already pays for energizer updates. It didn't make any sense for them to pay so much money so they went with other products.
So, I guess other than managing them and needing support from Barracuda Networks they do a very good job at blocking spam.
Riley
Captain Colonoscopy
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The barracudas seem to work well for most of my clients that have them. I will say their hardware is absolute junk, though. If you're looking at a 100 series appliance I'm assuming you don't have many mailboxes? Have you considered Postini or another mail scrubbing service instead? For clients that have around 10-20 users I've found that Postini can be cheaper than Barracuda and you don't have maintain any hardware. Plus, your mail queues up and doesn't bounce if your internets or mail server dies. 
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
I have a 400 model with several thousand mailboxes. It does a very good job, but as others have said, the hardware is junk. I've had RAID failures multiple times. Luckily we renew our hardware replacement warranty every year and Barracuda is very good with shipping replacement units, but it's hella expensive.
The next time I upgrade will be moving into the cloud to remove that hardware point of failure. Perhaps Barracuda will offer a cloud filtering service by then.... hrmmmm....
The next time I upgrade will be moving into the cloud to remove that hardware point of failure. Perhaps Barracuda will offer a cloud filtering service by then.... hrmmmm....
EDIT: I just realized i have a web filter, not the spam/virus filter... but here are my thoughts anyway...
Okay here are my thoughts. I have 2 Barracuda 310's deployed at one company. They have two different buildings (each has their own inet) and a single AD server.
As an IT guy, i think these are nice devices. They REALLY make my life easy as it prevents people from "getting into trouble". I can't say if the anti-spyware works... they've had a FEW cases of messed up machines, its usually a person with admin rights. And all other users are USERS and can't install software.
We also run anti-virus software, sooo as an anti virus/spyware utility can't say for 100% sure if it works, could be my network setup, could be this thing.
I can say that the admins at the company we used them LOVE them for keeping their employees off entertainment sites. They can fine tune what their employees do and they can log what each employee looks up, so they love them for that.
The employees HATEEEEEEEE THEM but its not a product FOR an employee, its for an IT guy or an adminstrator who wants to prevent traffic.
What i DONT like, is their price. They are VERY expensive for what they do. I believe we paid about 4k each for a 6 year or so package.
Now the model you want is probably cheaper, im just saying what i think.
I have issues with the configs and problems with users authenticating, but it might be due to my weird network setup.
I'd definitly buy the product again and deploy it. In my opinion, its great for a company who really wants to keep their employees off entertainment-style sites and get some anti-spyware in there. Its good for larger companies that have 50+ employees.
Hopefully that helps, not sure if it does, but its not a bad product.
Okay here are my thoughts. I have 2 Barracuda 310's deployed at one company. They have two different buildings (each has their own inet) and a single AD server.
As an IT guy, i think these are nice devices. They REALLY make my life easy as it prevents people from "getting into trouble". I can't say if the anti-spyware works... they've had a FEW cases of messed up machines, its usually a person with admin rights. And all other users are USERS and can't install software.
We also run anti-virus software, sooo as an anti virus/spyware utility can't say for 100% sure if it works, could be my network setup, could be this thing.
I can say that the admins at the company we used them LOVE them for keeping their employees off entertainment sites. They can fine tune what their employees do and they can log what each employee looks up, so they love them for that.
The employees HATEEEEEEEE THEM but its not a product FOR an employee, its for an IT guy or an adminstrator who wants to prevent traffic.
What i DONT like, is their price. They are VERY expensive for what they do. I believe we paid about 4k each for a 6 year or so package.
Now the model you want is probably cheaper, im just saying what i think.
I have issues with the configs and problems with users authenticating, but it might be due to my weird network setup.
I'd definitly buy the product again and deploy it. In my opinion, its great for a company who really wants to keep their employees off entertainment-style sites and get some anti-spyware in there. Its good for larger companies that have 50+ employees.
Hopefully that helps, not sure if it does, but its not a bad product.
Captain Colonoscopy
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Look at Astaro. Astaro's web filter is far superior to barracuda's offering and is the best out there right now IMO. I haven't had a chance to play with their spam filter but I would imagine it's fairly good, even does encryption which is nice. They also have an all-in-one UTM that does firewall, VPN, web filter, spam filter, etc in one box. Runs really well, too.
Other options for a spam appliance are the new Cisco Spam Firewall thingy. They basically took the IronPort stuff and jammed it into a smaller box to compete with Barracuda. IronPort is probably the best hardware spam filter out there, it's also freaking expensive though...
YeOldeStonecat
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We're having great experiences with Untangles recent addition to their product....
Commtouch Spam Booster, is a paid for module for Untangle.
http://www.untangle.com/Commtouch
Great product, easy to use spam quarantine digest is e-mail to each user daily.
The basic spam blocker with Untangle worked "OK"..you had to do some "tuning" with it. But the Commtouch add-on...wow, it's great. Hands off, does 98% right off the bat.
Other modules for Untangle may be of interest..the web filter, antivirus filtering, spyware module, etc.
Commtouch Spam Booster, is a paid for module for Untangle.
http://www.untangle.com/Commtouch
Great product, easy to use spam quarantine digest is e-mail to each user daily.
The basic spam blocker with Untangle worked "OK"..you had to do some "tuning" with it. But the Commtouch add-on...wow, it's great. Hands off, does 98% right off the bat.
Other modules for Untangle may be of interest..the web filter, antivirus filtering, spyware module, etc.
I want to note about the "IronPort stuff"... yeah it's insanely expensive, and it's 10x more powerful in terms of features than Barracuda, but it's also insanely convoluted to manage, unless they changed that within the past 1.5 years since I've used it. Maybe I'm just too used to Barracuda.
We have Barracuda 200's and they've worked well in terms of SPAM filtering as others have mentioned. I'd also agree that their hardware is pretty much crap. In fact, my client is in the process of switching over to Postini cause the 200's can't handle their spikes. Frustrating experience working with Barracuda to resolve the issue until I realized the hardware was just not powerful enough. They really should have some way of telling you this and offering you some kind of discount to upgrade. In my client's case, they've just lost a customer because of this.
We got one of their spam and virus firewalls given to us as a demo. I think the max you can get out of these boxes were 250 users with no upgrading past that. If you want to go past 250 years you have to find another solution or go with an IronPort.
I have a client that has a Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall 300 and they love it. Drop in and forget it. Seems like the hardware on the 300 was decent. It doesn't take us 30-90 seconds to navigate around, but in the 30 days it was in place it caught over 100,000 spam mesages for a ~300 user community (yes they sign up for alot of crap).
Another option is getting a fortinet fortigate with antispam on it.
Nice thing about fortinet's is almost all their models from their lowest on up have the complete feature set.
I've never been impressed with Barracuda products, I rank them around the quality of sonicwalls which I am also not a fan of as well. Have heard multiple horror stories about both as well outside of my own experience and their hardware isn't up to snuff for the most part imo.
Another option would be to get like microsoft frontbridge, or maybe the sophos antispam.
There are of course other options that are much more $$ such as ironmail from secure computing (now mcafee). Secure Computing makes excellent products. Having used pretty much every web filter under the sun their webwasher rocks serious ass. I haven't used ironmail antispam from them though.
Nice thing about fortinet's is almost all their models from their lowest on up have the complete feature set.
I've never been impressed with Barracuda products, I rank them around the quality of sonicwalls which I am also not a fan of as well. Have heard multiple horror stories about both as well outside of my own experience and their hardware isn't up to snuff for the most part imo.
Another option would be to get like microsoft frontbridge, or maybe the sophos antispam.
There are of course other options that are much more $$ such as ironmail from secure computing (now mcafee). Secure Computing makes excellent products. Having used pretty much every web filter under the sun their webwasher rocks serious ass. I haven't used ironmail antispam from them though.
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