Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX

For an important high availability website such as for email, this is a great solution. However, it does in a way, create it's own single point of failure in that if it goes down all the web servers it services are no longer available but there are ways around that rather than just spending more on a secondary unit. There are probably less expensive units or DNS methods you could use for less critical web sites you are trying to maintain. But for exchange and multiple website support with excellent reliability and support, this is a good solution.

Incentivized

[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.

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• Individualized services
• Basic load balancing
• Logging and reporting

Incentivized

• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

Incentivized

• The configuration settings are relatively granular, but instructions often only list the necessary fields, so if you need some custom settings it can be a little hunt and find what you need.
• Their support knowledge base page has instructions, but it can be difficult to navigate. There are different versions for different generations of both the barracuda devices and also the connecting software. (looking for setting up the Microsoft Exchange Load balancing can get you different instructions for each level of load balancer and also each version of Exchange).
• The internal logging review screens and settings can take a while to get used to how it is structured. It can also take a few tries to configure the service logging to get the type of information you'd like.

Incentivized

• Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
• I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
• It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
• It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
• I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

It is a product we plan on continuing to use.

Incentivized

Great value for the product

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It is fairly easy to learn after support helps you set it up and shows you how things work. Which they will do.

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This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers

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Barracuda, in general, has very responsive and high-quality support. It's fantastic to be able to get someone on the phone quickly when you need help or a fast call back. With instant replacement, you can feel assured that in the case of a complete failure, you will have a new unit with configuration intact within a day or two. One of the best for support in my experience.

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Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.

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We also had looked at Kemp and F5. The Kemp and F5 had a lot of horsepower and advanced configuration and functionality. When we looked at our workload and how we were planning on using the load balancers, we really didn't need all those extra bells and whistles. Barracuda provided all the standard functionality we needed and were looking for and did so at a greatly reduced price point.

Incentivized

All of those are paid solutions with very good features, but they also offer dedicated scenarios for web application hosting. If you run applications on on-premises web servers and don't have a Microsoft licence agreement, Nginx is a very good and reliable option, based on Linux distributions and available as freeware.

Incentivized

• It was a prerequisite for moving to Microsoft Exchange 2016, which requires a load balancer solution as part of the design. So, it allowed us to move forward with that upgrade. Having it to load balance VDI sessions is a bonus.

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• Our websites are noticeably faster, causing an increase in customer satisfaction.
• Nginx has such a low memory/resource footprint that we save money from not needing multiple large, expensive servers.
• Ability to load balance traffic, have server-redundancy, and have high-availability allows for 100% uptime and provides cost-effective solutions to alternatives that can cost a lot.

Incentivized