The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is a Secure Application Delivery Controller that enables Application Availability, Acceleration and Control, while providing Application Security Capabilities.
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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
Score 8.9 out of 10
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F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.
For an important high availability website such as for email, this is a great solution. However, it does in a way, create it's own single point of failure in that if it goes down all the web servers it services are no longer available but there are ways around that rather than just spending more on a secondary unit. There are probably less expensive units or DNS methods you could use for less critical web sites you are trying to maintain. But for exchange and multiple website support with excellent reliability and support, this is a good solution.
There was a need to have the DR environment to be available actively but not to send the traffic unless the production is down The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) priority feature helped achieving it. It was well suited in handling the HTTP headers using polices and iRules. It was less appropriate from the application security perspective in the current version. But after attending the AppWorld 2024, I see a lot of ways to protect the network and the application with several features.
Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
The configuration settings are relatively granular, but instructions often only list the necessary fields, so if you need some custom settings it can be a little hunt and find what you need.
Their support knowledge base page has instructions, but it can be difficult to navigate. There are different versions for different generations of both the barracuda devices and also the connecting software. (looking for setting up the Microsoft Exchange Load balancing can get you different instructions for each level of load balancer and also each version of Exchange).
The internal logging review screens and settings can take a while to get used to how it is structured. It can also take a few tries to configure the service logging to get the type of information you'd like.
Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a very good product. It is used in our company widely. So far we are very happy with the product. Esspecially on the load balancing and TLS encryption and Traffic redirecting based on HTTP path and http query. iRules is very easy to use as well.
Barracuda, in general, has very responsive and high-quality support. It's fantastic to be able to get someone on the phone quickly when you need help or a fast call back. With instant replacement, you can feel assured that in the case of a complete failure, you will have a new unit with configuration intact within a day or two. One of the best for support in my experience.
We also had looked at Kemp and F5. The Kemp and F5 had a lot of horsepower and advanced configuration and functionality. When we looked at our workload and how we were planning on using the load balancers, we really didn't need all those extra bells and whistles. Barracuda provided all the standard functionality we needed and were looking for and did so at a greatly reduced price point.
Obviously NetScaler, because we had that functionality, we just turned it on. We were only using it for our Citrix farms and we migrated all of our F5 uses over to the NetScalers. So simply because that was, other than buying the product, which the actual NetScaler themselves were cheap. I mean it cost us like $60,000 for all of them for the hardware. We were already licensed for it, so it was a no-brainer. We didn't have a choice. Definitely a superior product. A lot more functionality, particularly in corner cases where you might need to make some specific traffic tweaks. I would say that the NetScaler doesn't do nearly as good a job with that traffic filtering. You only really get URI filtering with NetScaler. You don't have the flexibility, the eye rolls or the complexity of the eye rolls, so that's a negative too.
It was a prerequisite for moving to Microsoft Exchange 2016, which requires a load balancer solution as part of the design. So, it allowed us to move forward with that upgrade. Having it to load balance VDI sessions is a bonus.
We use these for 600+ applications and we are able to manage all of them remotely and provide security across every application in one single platform.
We are able to provide an amazing customer experience load balancing across multiple nodes and this increases traffic on our websites and ultimately increases orders and traffic.
