An aggressive equipment maker's new device disrupts pricing at the low end of the load balancing market.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 18, 2006]

ISP-Planet readers are familiar with Mountain View, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks as the maker of cheap but powerful boxes. The company brought rational pricing to the anti-spam market with its first release, the Barracuda Spam Firewall, and has since launched the Barracuda Web Filter and Barracuda IM Firewall.

At ISPCON, the company launched the Barracuda Load Balancer. We catch up with the company by phone a few weeks after the show.

Stephen Pao, the company's vice president of product management, says Barracuda Networks realized that there was a niche waiting to be occupied.

"It's very, very similar to the anti-spam market that we entered. We developed the Barracuda Spam Firewall in 2002 and launched it in 2003 with a very different price point—no premiums or license fees. We rely on the product to sell itself, sending out evaluation units. Load balancing is in the same place. There's a market inefficiency. F5's charging upwards of $30,000 per box, and since most people buy a pair for high availability, the entry price is $60,000. Our entry level appliance with high availability is priced at $1,999, so the entry price is $4,000."

When Barracuda Networks introduced its anti-spam product, ISPs loved the pricing but found it lacked key features for the ISP environment, such as enabling different settings for different users or user groups, which are now available in all the high-end Barracuda Spam Firewall models.

So we ask if the company is prepared for the demands of the ISP market this time. "We went in with the features the marketplace expects," Pao explains. "It's a layer 4 load balancer. It's simple, fast, and does its job."

He explains to us that the high end boxes examine layer 7 to track specific applications, but that for smaller deployments, layer 4 inspection should suffice.

Features
As a bonus, the company has added basic intrusion detection, which Pao says other companies charge extra for. "This feature utilizes our security experience, our anti-virus, anti-spam, IM protection, and spyware prevention detection expertise."

Pao says that many ISPs are reluctant to provision intrusion prevention on in-line devices because they fear they'll add latency. "A lot of times, ISPs find that adding intrusion detection increases latency, sometimes by as much as 80 ms to 100 ms," he says. "We improve efficiency by integrating intrusion prevention in the IP stack."

Additional features include:

• Client IP persistence
• Route-path, bridge-path, and direct server return modes
• Service monitoring
• Server weighting
• Weighted lease connections and weighted round robin scheduling

So how does the company achieve disruptive pricing? Pao says that the company saves on sales, marketing, and distribution. "Our efficient distribution channel includes over 2,000 resellers here in the U.S., plus distribution relationships in over 50 countries."

As to marketing, he says the company focuses on sending out evaluation units, and recommends that ISP-Planet readers request their own evaluation unit. If the ISP keeps the unit beyond the thirty day trial period, they are billed, but they do not receive a bill if they return it before then.

Barracuda Networks places a special emphasis on tech support, he says. "We have 24 x 7 tech support, with centers worldwide in the U.S., Japan, China, and the UK. Our CEO demanded that we have no phone trees, so at Barracuda Networks, we always answer the phone. The person answering the phone may not be able to immediately solve the problem, but you'll get an assessment of the issue. If someone's system is down, we'll get right on it. If it's a configuration issue, we'll get back to you as soon as our engineers are available."

Pricing and availability
The Barracuda Load Balancer is available now in three models:

Pao says most ISPs will chose the 440 to obtain the API and to handle the largest volume of servers.

—End