Barracuda bites load balancer market

Security appliance vendor Barracuda releases new load balancer tool

Security appliance vendor Barracuda Networks has today released Barracuda Load Balancer 640, a new high-performance load-balancing system that it hopes will undercut the competition.

Barracuda's European vice-president, Paul Thackeray, said, "This model is really aimed at bigger companies that need to deal with Web 2.0 technologies. The earlier 440 model could only process 200 SSL TPS [Secure Sockets Layer transactions per second], but this can deal with 2,000 SSL TPS."

The 640 is a full-depth, 1U-high appliance, which has onboard intrusion prevention and uses hardware SSL acceleration, allowing it to support up to 250 servers, according to Barracuda. The appliance supports clustering, and will receive hourly intrusion prevention security (IPS) updates from Barracuda.

The 640 is priced at £9,900 + VAT including a yearly subscription fee for the IPS updates – which usually cost £1,499 + VAT. As with the earlier model, there is no per-port licensing fee.