Barracuda rocks!

Completely unrelated to virtualization but I just have to get this out:

The Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall rocks ! 

We have done a trial of a week and cought 12% more spam than we did with our old solution (SpamAssassin + MailScanner + MailWatch) which required more and more manual configuration and tweaking of detection rules. Although the Barracuda is still partly a SpamAssassin implementation they have reworked the Bayesian system among other things.

We went to full production last Tuesday and with some more training of the Bayesian we are now at a whopping 18% increase in spamdetection.

The units have performed flawlessly so far (in active-active cluster) and we got to ditch our old SMTP servers as it does outgoing and relaying as well. With the new firmware it even does outgoing spam checking. It just sweet. And price-performance is a no brainer as we can depreciate them over three year.

PowerConvert issue + storage status

PowerConvert has been giving us some headaches with the licensing. We have a Proof of Concept package but the license doesn’t allow us to deploy it. A call has been entered with Platespin and we are awaiting their information.

Also the decision on storage has not been taken yet because of political issues. EMC has our preference but there are other factors at play.

The final configuration looks like this:

• Clariion CX3-40 with:
  • 2 cages with 146GB 10k FC disks (for transaction systems and VM’s)
  • 1 cage with 300GB 10k FC disks (mostly for fileserver data)
  • 1 cage with 500GB LC FC disks (LC = LowCost / for archiving of data and diskbased backup)
• 2 Cisco MDS 9020 SAN Switches
• EMC DiskXtender
  • This is software that does policy based file server archiving (if it goes to EMC we’ll be adding EmailXtender in 2007 for policy based e-mail archiving)
• SanCopy
  • This is software to make array based copies between different SAN’s.
• Snapview
  • This is software to make snapshots and clones
• Navisphere
  • SAN Management software

Archiving for now will happen straight to the 500GB disks. In the future and taking into account changes that could happen in the field of data retention and new legislation we have the option of adding more near-line storage or adding Centera’s.

We will keep our MSL5026 robot for now and do backup and e-mailarchiving in 2007. We wouldn’t have the personnel for it anyway and it saves some serious money in the budget.

I consider myself lucky that we do not have to be SOX compliant or overly apprehensive because of liability. There is some privacy law that we have to live with but the consequence for the infrastructure is minimal. For example: BCM and our ISO27001:2005 certification are more important at the moment.

Have good weekend,