Barracuda EMEA Partner Conference & Barracuda Backup Service

I returned from Prague inspired with the Barracuda philosophy, as well as getting a better insight into the existing product range, and new products and features.

It was great to meet the senior management team of Barracuda, and meet people so driven and inspired by them.

It was also a good opportunity to meet existing e92plus resellers and our Dutch work colleagues from e92plus NL, as well as meet other resellers from around EMEA. It was good to meet Keith, who recognised me from this blog!

The product the caused the most buzz at the conference was the new Barracuda Backup Service.

Using a Barracuda appliance and software agents, you will be able to back up the servers within your organisation. This will obviously give a great alternative to existing tape back ups, but easy restoration and aaccessibility to your data as the appliance is onsite.

Obviously, you will say, what if something were to happen to the building, datacentre, appliance, etc, well the other component of the service is an offsite back solution. Previously this service was only available in the States, but due to some data laws within Europe, the data should not be store outsite of certain countries or Europe. The new datacentres for this European wide launch of this solution will be based in the UK, with new datacentres opening around Europe as and when.

This will allow data to be backed up onsite and allow quick restoration. In a DR situation, the data can be restore from the datacentres. You are able to select which data is sent offsite, so you are able to stop certain data from leaving your organisation.

More detailed information on the Barracuda website regarding the Barracuda Backup Service

The product is officially being launched on the 14th October at Storage Expo 2009 , and e92plus are holding sales training on 23rd October

How much is the service, well aside from the appliance and subscription cost, the offsite data storage is purchased in 100GB chunks, at only....... €69 per month per 100GB!!!

Work out the cost of your existing tape solution, and the savings will become obvious.

Barracuda Web Filter... deployment!

My team are out doing things today, so I've been left to hold the fort!
Strangely in a matter of minutes I had two very similar questions, from two different resellers working with different end users.

They looked at the Barracuda Web Filter as it was a very cost effective URL filtering solution. The issue was that did not want to deploy it as an in-line/transparent deployment due to a couple of reasons.

First off, what is an in-line/transparent deployment? This is where the solution will sit between the firewall and main switch, and transparently monitor the traffic, and intercept the internet traffic as necessary.

The other deployment is to use the solution as a forward proxy, where all the internal traffic is routed to the proxy server, and as the name suggests, will go out to the internet on behalf of the computer making the internet request.

The transparent deployment has a number of advantages, such as supporting application blocking, automatic pass-through if there is a system failure (on the 310 or above), the client browsers will not need to be modified and the client's IP address will be passed to the firewall. The downside is that during the initial setup there will be an interuption to the network traffic and some static routes may need to be configured.

With the forward proxy deployment there will be no need to interupt the network traffic, and static routes will not need to be configured. The flip side, is that as the Web Filter will only be able to scan the outbound HTTP traffic, it will not be able to block by applications listed, IP addresses specified or by specified ports. It will not be able to sacan non-HTTP traffic for viruses or spyware, and the cleint browser must be populated with the proxy server IP address.

The first customer I spoke to today had a highly distributed network, with a large number of subnets and VLANs, where as the second customer had complicated double layer router set up, with crossed and looped patching, so unable to find a single cable to intercept.

The two customers had a common comment, which was the Barracuda website did not highlight it was possible to use the Barracuda Web Filter as a forward proxy. As ever, I would recommend the services of a good distributor, before saying no!!!

Barracuda surprise!!

Barracuda have an annual partner conference, and this year the EMEA partner conference is being held in Prague.

It was a pleasent surprise to be invited by my boss to attend this event from a technical perspective. I'm hoping this will give me a better insight into the product roadmap, as well as how to effectively structure proof of concepts.

It will also be interesting to look round Prague as I have never been there before.