Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. F5 Distributed Cloud DNS

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

Probably less appropriate for smaller, very small IT departments, but more suited like when you're doing migrations to the cloud. If it is going to be doing setups for DNS within the cloud, this will let you help you set it up so there's no loss of communication between the two.

Incentivized

• Individualized services
• Basic load balancing
• Logging and reporting

Incentivized

• I think probably the UI, it's very easily you could scan through and select what you're going to do, and it's kind of similar of the functionality when you compare it to say the Oracle Cloud. So you can go side by side with the windows and then just go through these level when you're going to sell like a new DNS or a new opening on that.

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

• Probably more like AI suggested customizations, like when you do something and then have something like in the background of the AI. When you start doing something, it'll show you what you previously have done and then you could select, you wouldn't have to go through the whole steps over again. It'll say this is what you've done before, do you want to do a copy? And then just modify a couple of things so you don't have to go through the whole process.

Incentivized

It is a product we plan on continuing to use.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Very user friendly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• I guess positive because we know when we're going to open up, say a DNS or anything, or we're going to have to set something up. We can do it quick and fast instead of having to wait longer for the different steps of how we used to do it before.

Incentivized