Barracuda Load Balancer 340 Review
Over the last few months I have researched many different load balancers for our web server cluster. I have looked at f5, foundry, coyote point, array networks, and barracuda.
I was drawn to the Barracuda, who is a new entry in the market, because they seemed to have a really capable product for a great price. A single Load Balancer 340 was priced at about $2,500. So a redundant pair came it right at $5,000. The next closest product in terms of price was from Array Networks (which is also a very capable product in our testing), but there was a $10,000 price gap (per redundant pair).
The main problem was that I couldn’t find a review, or really any information about the barracuda, so I was a little stand-offish about the product, plus I knew it was less than a year old. However, I decided to give it a try anyway. After deploying the load balancer we ran into some problems. The biggest problem was that all traffic appeared in our logs as sourcing from the IP address of the load balancer. We contacted support about this at first we were told this is the way the load balancer worked, however, after a bit more work with support we found out this was not the case if we used the Direct Server Return mode.
For those that are new to load balancing, Direct Server Return is an awesome technology that lets your server reply to the client directly, so the load balancer doesn’t have to handle all of the traffic like a reverse proxy. Instead through some MAC address translation it fools the client into talking to one of your real servers directly even though they think they are connected to the Virtual IP address of the load balancer. This lets you achieve some amazing throughput numbers with the Load Balancer 340. You usually have to buy a very high priced load balancer (f5, foundry, etc) to get this type of technology.
I had a few more small issues with the load balancer, one of which was a bug they knew about and was fixed in the latest firmware release which I wasn’t running yet. But the support has helped me through every issue quickly. They have a great support infrastructure where you click a button in the interface and it hooks the appliance up to Barracuda support and they can remotely configure or repair the appliance.
I have purchased a total of 4 barracuda 340 load balancers and I am happy with them. For the $20,000 difference between this solution and the next closest solution it has definitely been worth the issues I had with configuration. Plus having worked with the load balancer team I know they are committed to making the product work for you.
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October 9th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Nice review.
I’ll just add that when you call support, you’ve got to find somebody that can help you. If you’re getting a call back from them, the guy is probably qualified. But if you call them (especially between midnight and 5am California time), chances are REALLY good that your mother knows more about the load balancers than the support guy. At least, that’s been my experience. Thrice.
October 16th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
We use DSR with weather.com. In adition, we use Netscalers for the L7 load balancing. Last winter storm, we took a 110 million page view day. Equal’s about 2 billion hits. DSR works well…
November 26th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Ron Davis (above) is right… support for the Barracuda LB’s is great during business hours and abysmal during non-business hours. You can’t beat the price, and overall we’ve had a satisfactory experience with the LB’s. The product is very green, though. There’s LOTS of room for improvement.
February 29th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I’m using two 340 load balancers, and run in to constant problems. Support has no clue on what to do, and I do get “I don’t know” a lot. So, I’m not sure what you guys are doing that it’s all great for you… Not the case with me.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Ok i have great fun with these…. next time i am buying a kemp.
However one thing you must note if your using Route Path please ensure you dont plug in both interfaces. One Public and One Private.
The thing will work very unreliably if at all.
DSR while they say it will work with both interfaces plugged in and on different subnets etc. It is quite unreliable and will go out every few hours.
Inserting Static routes and Playing with metrics will get you some of the way there. But you will probably still have problems.
The documentation is pretty bad, and I learnt more about the unit talking to support tryng to fix the aforementioned problem then from the manual.
Besides that unit is good.
November 11th, 2009 at 3:02 am
HELP! I have 2 Barracuda 340 load balancers and need to sell them. I asked Barracuda how to go about this and they said the equipment can’t be transfered so I might as well throw them away. I find this hard to believe.
I’m not techy in ANY WAY, but I’m sure someone out there would know if that’s accurate or if there’s a way around that. If there is I would LOVE to know. These belonged to my X-husband and I have no use for them. One looks like it’s never been taken out of box and the other has been used.
Any suggestions? I APPRECIATE IT!
Natalie