Stories about: Barracuda Networks

Spam. It fills our in-boxes, wastes our time and spreads malware -- and it's only getting worse. According to Ferris Research, which studies messaging and content control, 40 trillion spam messages are expected to be sent in 2008, costing businesses more than $140 billion worldwide -- a significant increase from the 18 trillion spam messages sent in 2006 and the 30 trillion in 2007.

Known for anti-spam appliances and firewalls, Barracuda Networks is relatively new to the load-balancing game. The company's series of load balancers span the range from a basic 10-server model that starts at US$1,995 to an enterprise model with an entry price of US$8,999 and that supports an unlimited number of servers and virtual clusters. As the models increase in size and cost, they also add some nice features. These include active/passive high availability that is extremely easy to set up, the ability to route traffic based on the type of service (layer 7 load balancing), cookie persistence for e-commerce (and other applications that need to identify users from one session to the next), and hardware-based SSL acceleration.

Whether you call them application delivery controllers, application accelerators, application traffic managers, or just load balancers, the solutions for scaling out Web sites and improving the performance of Web applications have come a long way from their humble beginnings. The result is a great deal of choice in the marketplace, from bare-bones appliances with basic functionality to high-capacity switch-based systems that handle Web traffic in wildly sophisticated ways.

Open-source security software maker Sourcefire has rejected a US$186 million unsolicited takeover offer from Barracuda Networks.

E-mail security continues to be a hot-button issue for IT administrators, who now find more moving parts in mail security solutions than they did just a couple of short years ago. Fighting viruses and spam were the original spurs for creating e-mail security appliances, and anti-spam is still the most important component of mail security. But the solutions have evolved to meet a host of additional requirements. These include securing connections between users, both internal and external; preventing loss of corporate data; stopping new types of threats such as phishing, spyware, and other types of malware; and blocking DoS and other network attacks as well as some application-layer attacks on mail servers.

Intellectual property, or IP, in the form of patents is, in theory, how we reward those who break new ground, explore strange new technologies, geek out new algorithms and new gadgets, and boldly go where no techie has gone before. In practice, the whole field of IP has become a complete mess with patents being awarded for things that no sane person would call "novel" -- once a key requirement for patentability.

Barracuda Networks plans to focus on finding prior art to defend itself and the open-source ClamAV project against patent claims by rival antivirus vendor Trend Micro, which stressed Tuesday that it owns a tested and valid patent.

NotchUp.com has upped the ante in the job recruiting stakes by allowing potential candidates to calculate a price for which they will agree to interview with prospective employers.

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has voted to investigate claims by Trend Micro of competitors' patent infringement involving antivirus products.

As companies move to restrict Web surfing at work, more of them are blocking access to MySpace than to Facebook, according to a survey released Wednesday by Web security company Barracuda Networks Inc.

The U.S. patent and legal system has turned into a battlefield where companies and technology developers can be attacked. Open-source and free software developers have historically ignored this secondary battlefield, focusing instead on the primary battlefield of development and proliferation of their project. This omission leaves open-source projects and individual developers vulnerable to patent infringement lawsuits. By creating its own defensive patent portfolio as commercial companies do, the open-source community can arm itself for this battle.