Barracuda Load Balancer

At Barracuda Networks, 2012 is the Year of the School

Friday, February 10th, 2012

by Sanjay Ramnath, Product Manager

K-12 schools, districts, and agencies simply can’t afford not to make sure that their networks, data, and users are totally secure—especially with vulnerable students accessing those networks every day. The dangers are too great to take any chances. And with mobile devices and social-media usage extending the threat landscape in new directions, yesterday’s solutions simply aren’t good enough.

That’s why 2012 will see Barracuda Networks reaching out to K-12 organizations in North America—including public and private schools, school districts, and county and state education agencies—to let them know that effective, affordable, easy-to-manage security solutions are out there, optimized just for them.

To learn more about how Barracuda solutions address the unique network security challenges facing K-12 organizations, please download this informative white paper, entitled  “Dynamic Content Security for K-12 Organizations.”

The Barracuda Advantage

“Dynamic Content Security” is the name for a more holistic, integrated approach to network security that delivers:

  • Improved network performance
  • Dramatic cost savings—both long- and short-term
  • Total content security that protects every user—including mobile and off-network users
  • Fine-grained controls to optimize capacity and access
  • Simple, centralized control panel to make network management a breeze (plus award-winning customer and technical support for when it’s not)
  • Comprehensive forensic reporting to optimize resources and budgets, identify bandwidth-hogging users and apps, demonstrate regulatory compliance, and manage civil or criminal liability
  • Multiple deployment options—including on-site appliances, virtual appliances, cloud-based services, or a combination—to ensure a solution that fits your needs, capabilities, and budget

Promotional Payment Terms for K-12 Customers

We understand the intense budget pressures affecting schools, districts, and agencies today. That’s why we created the K-12 Budget Alignment Program . This limited-time promotion allows qualified North American K-12 customers to postpone paying for their Barracuda security solutions until July 31, 2012—long enough to take advantage of new-fiscal-year budget allocations.

With the K-12 Budget Alignment Program 2012, security and compliance don’t have to wait; but paying for them can.

And there’s more, K-12 organizations may also qualify for a significant discount off the retail list price of selected Barracuda solutions. To learn more, contact Barracuda today at 1-888-ANTI-SPAM (1-888-268-4772).

Managing the Transformation in Education

K-12 education is changing, and technology is driving that change. The benefits of these changes are immense. But without a new approach to security, the threats they bring could easily overwhelm the advantages.

At Barracuda, we’re committed to helping K-12 organizations use Dynamic Content Security to manage that transformation safely, securely, simply, and affordably. With Barracuda solutions in place, schools can rest assured that their user community is protected; that network management will continue to be streamlined and simple; and that their IT costs will be kept as low as possible well into the future.

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Monitor Groups

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

by Anshuman Singh, Product Manager

Monitoring backend server applications can be a daunting proposition especially if the application is comprised of multiple network services. For example, in Exchange 2010 there are a number of underlying services like MAPI/RPC, MAPI/DCOM, and Exchange Services HTTPS that are required to work in tandem. If any of the underlying services fail, then the whole application group fails over.

To address this challenge, the Barracuda Load Balancer has introduced the concept of “Monitor Groups“. Barracuda Load Balancers today already have the ability to monitor the health and availability of services using built-in network or application level monitors. With monitor groups, the Barracuda Load Balancer will combine multiple tests to check multiple ports or services. The failure of any one test means the Real Server is considered as unavailable and will be removed from the load balancing pool.

To use Monitor Groups, go to Advanced->Monitor Groups. Using the UI, you can create or edit new groups.

To enable the monitor groups, you can go to the details page of Service or Real Server. Go to Basic->Services and then click the edit icon. Scroll down to  Service Monitors and enable the new Monitor Groups for the associated Service and/or Servers.

Monitor groups is just one of the many new features to be released with the new firmware 4.0.0 of the Barracuda Load Balancer. Once released, firmware update 4.0.0 is available to all customers with an active Energize Update subscription. You can leave your comments below or on the Barracuda Load Balancer forum at https://login.barracuda.com.

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Support for Server Name Indication (SNI)

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Posted by: Anshuman Singh, Product Manager

We are adding the support for Server Name Indication in the firmware 4.0 release for the Barracuda Load Balancer. This feature enhances the support available for hosting multiple domains on one service. This is particularly useful in a virtual hosting scenario where organizations may have several domains hosted on a single server using the same IP address. Each domain may have a distinct SSL certificate and as a result, there needs to be a way for the server to select the proper certificate for a particular domain.

Server Name Indication (SNI) extends the SSL /TLS protocol to solve the issue of hosting multiple domains on the same IP address. It accomplishes this by sending the virtual domain information as part of the SSL/TLS negotiation between the client and server. Clients supporting this extension will now send the domain name when the initializing a secure SSL session. The server side component will look at the domain name and send the corresponding certificate to the client.

For SNI to work properly, both the client browser and the web servers must support the SNI extension. Fortunately, SNI is already supported on most of the major browser platforms:

Browser Platform Support
Internet Explorer IE 7+ on Windows Vista or later
Firefox Firefox 2.0+
Chrome Chrome 6+ on Windows Vista or later

Chrome 5.0.342.1+ on Mac OS X 10.5.7+

Safari Safari 2.1+ on Mac OS X 10.5.6+

Safari 2.1+ on Windows Vista or later

MobileSafari on iOS 4+ (iPhone, iPads, iPods)

Android Default browser on Honeycomb or later

On the server side, SNI is support on both Apache and IIS:

Web Server Platform Support
Apache 2.2.12+ using mod_ssl
Microsoft IIS IIS 8+

How is this different from Wildcard Certificates?
A possible alternative for using SNI is to use wildcard certificates. This allows organizations to use a single certificate for sub-domains within your domain. This also enables organizations only have to set up a single service on the Barracuda Load Balancer to serve multiple sub-domains. For example, you can configure a single HTTPS service using a wildcard certificate (*.example.com) for https://sales.example.com or https://support.example.com.

The Barracuda Load Balancer supports wildcard certificates today but the limitation to wildcard certificates is that they are more expensive (typically 3-5x more expensive than single domain certificates) and cannot support multi-domains that are distinct from each other like www.mysite1.com and www.mysite2.com. Multi-domain support is especially critical for web hosting providers or Managed Service Providers (MSP) who may have multiple virtual web servers representing numerous domains on a single physical server using a single IP address.

What about Subject Alternative Name (SAN) Certificates?
SAN certificates are supported by the Barracuda Load Balancer today and fall somewhere between a wildcard certificate and a single domain certificate. SAN Certificates allows organizations to specify alternative domains for a service. For example a SAN certificate for www.example.com could have the alternative domains www.examples.net and www.ex.com listed as alternative names for the same service. This partially solves the multi-domain limitation with wildcard certificates but SAN Certificates are more expensive than single domain certificates and are often limited to 3-5 domains. More importantly, not all Certificate Authorities sell SAN enabled certificates.

How Do I Configure SNI in the Barracuda Load Balancer?
With SNI, you can use the Barracuda Load Balancer to assign any number and any type of certificates (single, wildcard or SAN) to a single Barracuda Load Balancer service. This can be set using the new SSL Offloading UI interface.

In this example, client HTTPS request to:

http://www.mysite1.com will get the mysite1-cert certificate
http://www.mysite2.com will get the mysite2-cert certificate
http://www.mysite3.com will get the DEFAULT certificate

This provides enormous flexibility in assigning domains to a single IP address and you can add as many certificates to the service as need.

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New Case Study on Load Balancing Microsoft Applications

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Posted by:  Oliver Wai, product marketing manager

Barracuda Load Balancers have helped organizations load balance their Microsoft applications for a number of years now. With our partnership with Microsoft and our wealth of deployment guides, Barracuda Networks has been able to provide our customers with the tools and the platform for immediate success. Today I wanted to highlight one of many customer success stories.

Accelerating Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Communication Server (OCS)

Illinois-based Fenwal Blood Technologies Inc. is a pioneer and global leader in the development of products that improve the safety and availability of blood. Having experienced steady growth over its 60-plus year history, Fenwal decided to build a new data center from the ground up to keep pace with the continued market success and growth of its lifesaving blood technologies.

“To support 6,000-plus global users, we needed to redesign and scale our Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communication Server (OCS) infrastructure,” said Darryl Kegg, server engineering manager at Fenwal.

After evaluating a number of different solutions, Kegg and his team decided to deploy three Barracuda Load Balancer 340s to support the organization’s needs. “We chose the Barracuda Load Balancer because of its ease of use and industry best price-to-performance,” said Kegg. “The fact that the Barracuda Load Balancers are certified by Microsoft for Exchange and Office Communication Server Load Balancing made it an easy choice for us.”

Immediate Results

The Fenwal server engineering team deployed two Barracuda Load Balancer 340s in a high availability (HA) cluster to distribute traffic to internal networks and an additional Barracuda Load Balancer in the DMZ to load balance incoming traffic. In less than a day, Kegg’s team was able to configure:

  • Microsoft Exchange: Incoming SMTP, Outlook Web Access (OWA), Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) and Exchange ActiveSync traffic are distributed by all three Barracuda Load Balancers. POP3 traffic is handled exclusively by the HA pair.
  • Office Communication Server: Web conferencing, AV conferencing, HTTPS, MTLS, TLS, SIP services are load balanced by the Barracuda Load Balancer HA cluster.
  • SharePoint: All SharePoint traffic is load balanced on the Barracuda Load Balancer HA cluster.

With this configuration, Fenwal easily averages more than 10,000 SharePoint and Exchange requests along with more than 1,000 OCS requests each hour. “We’re extremely pleased with our Barracuda Load Balancers and we are planning to add additional Barracuda Load Balancers to our international data centers soon.”

For more details of Fenwal Blood Technology story, please read the case study. To download solution guides for load balancing Microsoft applications click here.

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Now Available: Barracuda Load Balancer Firmware Release 3.6

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Posted by:  Oliver Wai, product marketing manager

The Barracuda Load Balancer is a quality product that provides industry best price and performance. Today we added some important enhancements with our latest Load Balancer 3.6 firmware:

  1. Barracuda Control Center Support – Barracuda Load Balancers now support Barracuda Control Center integration. This allows for centralized management of up to 250 Barracuda Networks appliances or virtual appliances all from a single interface. This is an important functionality for customers with a number of Barracuda Load Balancers deployed or for MSPs who may be managing Barracuda Load Balancers on behalf of customers.
  2. HTTP Persistence Enhancements – We extended the HTTP persistence mode to support HTTP Header and Parameter persistence. This gives customers additional options to the existing cookie and IP persistence to route clients to the same backend server for the duration of the user sessions. This is particularly useful for Microsoft Exchange 2010 load balancing as it gives administrators additional persistence modes to use on deployments.
  3. Enhanced Last Resort Action – In addition to being able to route traffic to another server, administrators can now reset incoming connections and/or send back default failure responses.
  4. SSL Layer Performance Improvements – New optimizations to the SSL infrastructure on the Barracuda Load Balancers mean that existing Load Balancer customers will experience increased performance on SSL transactions. This is substantial in that it extends the capabilities of the platform and gives customers additional headroom for growth.

Please visit the Barracuda Load Balancer product overview page for more information

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Scaling Microsoft Servers

Monday, December 6th, 2010

Posted by:  Oliver Wai, product marketing manager

At Barracuda Networks, we work closely with all of our Technology Partners to bring key solutions that solve our customers’ needs. Today I wanted to highlight some of the Load Balancing and scalability solutions that we’ve produced with Microsoft.

Barracuda Networks is a Microsoft certified Unified Communications Load Balancer partner and have been working closely with Microsoft to create certified configurations to scale Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. We’ve built three key deployment configurations that balance traffic across several servers:

  • Enterprise pool with multiple front-end servers: In this scenario, the Barracuda Load Balancer acts as the connectivity point to multiple front-end servers in an Enterprise pool in consolidated and expanded configuration. In the expanded configuration, the Barracuda Load Balancer also balances traffic to the Web Components servers of the Enterprise pool.
  • Array of Directors: In this scenario, the Barracuda Load Balancer serves as the connectivity point to multiple Directors in an array.
  • Array of Edge Servers: In this scenario, the Barracuda Load Balancer serves as the connectivity point to both the internal and external NICs for multiple Edge Servers in an array.

These configurations have been rigorously tested by both Microsoft and Barracuda Networks to ensure interoperability, scalability and ease of deployment. We have numerous customers already using the deployment in production and we’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers about our price performance and ease-of-use.

“It took me less than an hour to set up (the Barracuda Load Balancer with) OCS 2007 and only a few hours (to set up ) Exchange & Sharepoint services.”

-          Server Engineering Manager at Midwest medical technology company

The solution guides for both Exchange 2010 and Office Communication Server 2007 R2 can be found on Microsoft’s Microsoft Unified Communications Load Balancer technet page or on Barracuda Networks’ solution page at http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/support/documentation.php.

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Accelerate Web Application Delivery with Barracuda Load Balancers

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Posted by:  Oliver Wai, product marketing manager  
 
 While most load balancers improve scalability by distributing traffic among multiple servers, they also happen to be in an ideal place in the network to accelerate the traffic, too.  With the latest Barracuda Load Balancer firmware release, we’ve added HTTP caching and HTTP compression to:
  • Reduce load on your backend Web servers
  • Improve response times to end users

All without adding extra equipment to your data center.

Almost all applications, including many legacy applications, are accessible through Web browsers and new applications are designed specifically with the Web in mind. Even email servers such as Exchange have Web application components that support Web access, such as Outlook Web Access. Consequently Web application acceleration has become an increasingly important part of any load balancing solution.

So, why is HTTP caching and HTTP compression important?

 HTTP caching allows you to offload application delivery components to the Barracuda Load Balancer. If you look at any Web site, you will notice that there are a lot of static files that are shared across a number of pages.  An example of this would be the CSS Style Sheet file used by all of the pages to standardize the look and feel of the Web site. With the new HTTP caching features, you can increase Web server performance by offloading the delivery of these frequently accessed files to the Barracuda Load Balancer. The Barracuda Load Balancer supports cache control headers sent by both the clients and the servers.

HTTP compression allows you to improve the end user experience by limiting the amount of data sent from the Web server to the user. This is especially useful if you have a slow Internet connection. Any smart phone user can attest to the difficultly of browsing heavy pages on a slow connection. Most browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari support compression. The Barracuda Load Balancer will automatically communicate with the end-user’s browser to enable compression, if the browser supports it, without any additional configuration or software.

HTTP caching and HTTP compression are available at no additional charge to customers with the Barracuda Load Balancer 440 model and higher in firmware release 3.4. To install the latest firmware version click on “Firmware update” under the “Advanced Tab” in the user interface of the Barracuda Load Balancer.  For more information please visit the Barracuda Load Balancer product overview page or contact your regional sales representative.

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