Veteran IT buyers know that vendor promises about performance or capacity tend to be aspirational rather than factual. But Barracuda, maker of the Network Spam Firewall, has stooped to a new low: eight times lower, that is.
Recent experiences with their Model 300 in an ISP environment demonstrated that each box could handle 250,000 messages per day, only 12.5% of the marketing literature???s stated capacity of 2 million messages per day.
Calls by the ISP???s staff to Barracuda???s tech support resulted in little progress. However, a salesperson left a message suggesting that the 2 million mark could be only attained by ???corporate customers, in a very pristine environment, not dealing with very much spam and everything like that??????
In a follow-up e-mail an upper-tier technician wrote that ???the data sheets reflect an environment in which the spam firewall can perform at its best with dropping over 99% of the traffic at the MTA level?????? He further stated that the average organization drops 75% of the traffic at the MTA level, which by Barracuda???s own calculation translates into a capacity of 306,000 messages per day???better performance than the ISP was getting, but still just 30.6% of the marketing literature.
Barracuda gets very low marks for veracity, but very high marks for brazenness: a salesperson attempted an upsell with a measly 10% credit toward hardware that was a little less than a year old.
--Frank Bulk, [email protected]
