The company that disrupted pricing in several other e-mail industries gets into the latest fad with a sharp appliance.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 2, 2007]

Campbell, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks has earned a following in the industry for doing what it says it does. This should not be so unusual, but it is.

Stephen Pao, vice president of product management at Barracuda Networks, describes the achievement more aggressively, saying that the company delivers price disruptive comprehensive solutions with no hidden fees labeled as "options", plug and play products that install quickly, with intuitive web-based interfaces.

For ISPs, a company whose boxes are actually the listed price is a good and unusual thing (see our Editorial: Just Tell Me The Price).

Pao points out that boxes without per-user license fees are also good for the ISP market. This is a good point. All too often companies arrive at the ISP market with a box designed for enterprise customers that has a per-user price designed for the IT budgets of big business.

Pao further touts the value of selecting a single vendor for a solution (no finger pointing, and a single contact for all support and service). While these are good points, ISPs are also wary of using a proprietary solution that might be difficult to replace.

On the other hand, many ISPs are trying to persuade their own customers to hand over more of their own IT needs to the ISP, to see the ISP as a single point of contact for all support and service.

Growing
Pao says the products are popular and the company is growing, having just moved into new office space in Campbell. "It's double the square footage of our previous space. We have more people. We're releasing new products. We're keeping the same product strategy."

The new product that Pao is talking about today is the latest trend in enterprise services: e-mail archiving. "Requirements that were traditionally the domain of large companies are now an issue for small companies," Pao says. "This is a great opportunity for ISPs."

Barracuda Networks, Pao says, designed a box that would be able to use an ISP's existing storage infrastructure (NAS, SAN, or JBOD) to handle e-mail archiving with virtually unlimited long term needs. It has a web-based GUI with an intuitive interface (see image at right) and although it has 2 TB of onboard RAID 5 storage, it is also designed to leverage other storage attached to the network.

The box can be attached to a journaling e-mail server (like Exchange), Pao says, or can be placed in-line, acting as an SMTP relay. It plays well with the Barracuda Spam Firewall and can pull e-mail from there too, if one is available.

Pao says the product has "ex post facto virus scanning" which is a fancy way of saying that when you re-open the mail archive, the system will scan that archive with the latest virus signatures. "You don't want to infect people when you're handing over evidence," he warns.

The product can import files in MAPI, POP, and IMAP formats. In is designed to eliminate duplicate e-mails and compress them, saving on storage. "LAN file storage is for many ISPs the worst case. Messages are often not compressed and not de-duped," Pao says.

The product can also enforce corporate e-mail policies. It has several other software features not listed in this article.

Pricing and availability
The Barracuda Message Archiver 650 is available now from Barracuda Networks. It is priced at $14,999. It comes with 2 TB of RAID 5 storage, a Gigabit Ethernet interface, and all the software features described in this article.

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