Six Cool Data Protection Features that You Probably Did Not Know Barracuda Networks Offered

Walking through airports, listening to the radio or watching television, it is difficult to miss the “Barracuda Networks” name on airport hallway posters or during commercial breaks. However as one who covers enterprise data protection and data storage, I still tend to think of “Barracuda Networks” in the context of “small and midsized enterprise.” While Barracuda did not try to dissuade me of that mindset in a recent conversation I had with it, that conversation did reveal six little known facts and features about the enterprise functionality that it offers behind the scenes to organizations of this size.

Source: Barracuda

When one looks at Barracuda’s product line-up, one will quickly notice that they are most appropriately configured for deployment in small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs). Yet behind the hardware specs on its product data sheets are six (6) other attributes of its products and the company itself that every SME should evaluate when selecting a data protection solution. Consider:

1. All support calls are answered by a live operator. While I have not personally verified this claim or how quickly its operators answer calls, live support carries a lot of weight with SMEs. IT staff and this shop are typically stretched thin and, having once worked as an IT administrator in a small shop, I know the value of having someone available to pick up the phone and answer my questions as quickly as possible. In fact, Barracuda finds that it wins a lot of deals with SMEs simply because it offers this personalized level of support that many of its competitors do not.
2. Instant Replacement program. Every 3-5 years organizations typically have to upgrade their hardware infrastructure. While budget is clearly a consideration when making upgrades, the larger hassles that SMEs face are evaluating new products and then migrating the existing data to the new solution. Barracuda addresses these two concerns with its Instant Replacement program. At the end of four (4) years, subscribers to its support receive a complimentary hardware refresh to appliances that offer the latest generation CPUs along with more RAM and storage. Further, it includes the software needed to migrate data for the old appliance to the new one.
3. Owns its own cloud. Everyone talks about backing up to and recovering from the cloud. While Barracuda certainly makes that claim its well, it distinguishes itself from many of its competitors with the Barracuda Cloud. In other words, while other providers may be working on integration with one of the numerous public cloud storage providers on the market, SMEs that use Barracuda’s data protection appliances immediately get access and connectivity to the Barracuda cloud infrastructure. This gives them the flexibility to make offsite copies to the cloud, archive data for long term retention, restore data back from the cloud and even recover and boot virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. Access to this cloud and these options all come part of the standard Barracuda Networks support package.
4. Setup in as little as 15 minutes. All appliances come pre-configured with replication to the Barracuda cloud which include default policies for scheduling backups and data retention. This reduces the time and configuration associated with setting up each appliance to a task that is as simple as identifying new backup targets and initiating the backup process.
5. Offers virtual appliances. When one thinks about Barracuda Networks various backup appliance offerings, one may often think about them in the context of a “box.” That changed last fall when it made its backup appliance available as a virtual appliance. Using this new option, small organizations or organizations with remote and branch offices that are fully virtualized may now leverage Barracuda’s data protection solution without needing to introduce a new physical appliance into their already virtualized environment. Now they can simply install a virtual appliance as another VM on their existing Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi hypervisor.
6. Robust compression and deduplication algorithms for efficient data replication. The origins of Barracuda’s cloud replication is found in technology that was first developed 10 years ago to replicate data to the cloud over dial-up lines. That limitation of dial-up forced it to develop very robust compression and deduplication algorithms to efficiently replicate data to and from the cloud. That carries over today as these technologies are arguably on par or even better than products available from many competitors typically classified as “enterprise.”

The conversation I had with Barracuda Networks last week served as a catch-up call for me but it also provided some valuable insight into its data protection appliances that contain some pretty cool features. Yes, its appliances are primarily tuned and configured for the specific backup and recovery needs of SMEs. But behind the scenes Barracuda also includes many of the capabilities that SMEs might only expect to find in enterprise data protection solutions at a price that aligns with their budget.