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Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

Score9 out of 10

7 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Barracuda Load Balancer ADC?

The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is a Secure Application Delivery Controller that enables Application Availability, Acceleration and Control, while providing Application Security Capabilities.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Barracuda Load Balancer ADC.
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Basic load balancer

Incentivized
Timothy GoodView profile
System Administrator in Information Technology at Michigan State University (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Individualized services
  • Basic load balancing
  • Logging and reporting

Cons

  • In-depth customization
  • Detailed look into inspections of packet flow
  • Separation of node and services for reuse

Return on Investment

  • Low cost and lasted 5 years
  • Balanced email and email services fairly well

Alternatives Considered

F5 BIG-IP

Other Software Used

F5 BIG-IP, Proofpoint Email Protection, Microsoft Office 365

Barracuda Network Load Balancer for Exchange 2016 and VMware Horizon View

Incentivized
Shawn UmanskyView profile
Network Engineer in Information Technology at Saint Michael's College (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • It provides real time monitoring of each server being load balanced, and will show an alert if something goes offline.
  • It allows one to put a server or service in maintenance mode in preparation for planned maintenance.

Cons

  • Overall, there are no issues. It just runs.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Barracuda Load Balancer 340 in Higher Education Environment

Incentivized
Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Provide High Availability.
  • Reduce downtime due to hardware or software failure.
  • Allow for maintenance periods for IT without affecting end users access.
  • Increase performance of services by distributing the load across more than one server.

Cons

  • We also use the load balancer as a redirect server for web applications. When these are set up they show a red x like the services are down. I would like for them to have a setting made in future firmware to simply remove the status on redirects.
  • I would also like for them to do on-demand online training for the load balancer like they already offer for free on many of their products.

Return on Investment

  • Positive impact: We can now do server maintenance without disrupting services to the end users.
  • Positive impact: It keeps our servers from getting overloaded during peak utilization times.
  • Positive impact: If we have one server fail the load is shifted to the server that is up to reduce downtime.

Other Software Used

LogMeIn Rescue, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall (formerly NG Firewalls), AlienVault USM

Usability

Full Featured Load Balancer with Excellent Support

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Excellent Load Balancing.
  • Flexible configuration - It's very simple to configure and powerful enough to handle many more websites than just our exchange site.
  • Continuously updated - Barracuda makes fairly frequent updates to address issues and improve features.

Cons

  • The interface for identifying the physical ports is not as intuitive as it could be. It can take physical documentation to make sense of it when you have not worked on it for some time.
  • Renewals are a bit on the pricey side. With Barracuda you generally have two renewals. One for the updates and one for Instant Replacement which for something like this you really want to have.

Return on Investment

  • It has allowed us to maintain a very high level of uptime.
  • It has allowed us to perform server updates without the downtime of services.
  • It has provided a consistent user experience by properly balancing service loads across servers.

Other Software Used

Trend Micro ServerProtect, Fortinet FortiGate

Barracuda Load Balancers, Balancing Bang for your Buck

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • The reporting and interface to configure the load balancer are detailed but still intuitive and easy to manage.
  • The configuration wizards, along with Barracuda's listing of configuration templates/instructions on their support page, make configuration relatively quick and easy.
  • Reporting allows us to easily monitor our workloads, which the load balancer has been handling without any issues or slowdowns. We also had no problems setting the load balancer to export logs to our central logging solution.
  • The couple of times that we needed assistance, support was extremely efficient and helpful. I really like that i can go online, open a ticket, and schedule a time for support to call me.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • Barracuda has allowed us to get the load balancing we needed for Sharepoint and Exchange traffic (replaced Microsoft NLB and DNS round robin) and we were able to get 2 devices (set in high availability) for close to what the other bigger load balancing companies were offereing for 1 device.
  • Barracuda also replaced our TMG reverse proxy for a couple separate web services. The TMG's were out of support and we needed a solution to replace them. When looking we saw that Barracuda could do the work and in a day we were able to set them up. This saved us from having to find a separate reverse proxy solution and helped eliminate 2 other devices.
  • It has also saved us in after hours work, as we can take a portion of Sharepoint or Exchange offline to update and patch servers during the normal day.

Other Software Used

Websense TRITON, Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business, Microsoft Office 365, VMware vCenter Server, Quest Identity Manager, BMC Track-It!