Barracuda Networks Gains 100x Faster Query Responses and 50% Reduction in Operational Costs with Spice.ai OSS

Barracuda Networks is a leading cybersecurity company providing complete protection across email, data, applications, and networks. Its portfolio--including a fully managed XDR service--helps organizations and channel partners strengthen cyber resilience with solutions that are innovative, easy-to-use and built for real-world operational demands.

With the intelligent BarracudaONE cybersecurity platform, 24/7 SOC, and a comprehensive suite of security offerings, Barracuda enables businesses to adopt Cybersecurity-as-a-Service efficiently, addressing escalating threats while alleviating pressure from the ongoing shortage of cybersecurity talent.

Hundreds of thousands of organizations rely on Barracuda for its industry-leading protection, operational efficiency, and proven ability to simplify complex security challenges.

As demand for its email security and data backup offerings continues to grow, Barracuda needed an efficient way to provide increasingly fast, reliable, and cost-effective data access. These are data-intensive workloads with strict latency requirements, making performance and scalability essential for customer experience.

Solution

To support these workloads, Barracuda turned to Spice AI using Spice.ai Enterprise. By unifying federated SQL query, search, and AI inference into a single engine, Spice.ai accelerates data access for mission-critical workloads, and makes it simple and easy for developers to build fast and accurate data-intensive applications and AI agents across cloud, edge, and on-premises environments.

Through a design partnership that included regular engineering team collaboration, Barracuda and the Spice AI team worked to solve the core problem of getting data to their archival and auditing applications in real-time--and cost-effectively. Their work resulted in:

• Using Spice.ai OSS, the open-source compute engine purpose-built for accelerating queries and simplifying data workflows
• Switching from ODBC connectors to direct Delta queries through Spice, slashing query times
• Delta Lake support for cost-effective query performance
• Databricks integration for minimal application changes and developer productivity
• Numerous bug fixes and performance improvements, directly benefiting Barracuda's infrastructure

The partnership wasn't one-sided. Barracuda also contributed back to Spice.ai OSS, making pull requests to improve Helm Charts and deployment automation, reinforcing the value of open-source collaboration.

Benefits

The impact at Barracuda has been significant:

• 100x faster data lake query responses
• 30x faster audit log queries
• Consolidation of multiple data operations into a single runtime
• 50% reduction in operational costs

Up to 100x Faster Data Lake Query Responses

One of Barracuda's offerings is its email archiving system, a tool businesses rely on for legal and compliance purposes. Customers also use it to search through massive volumes of archived emails and retrieve what they need.

By leveraging Spice.ai's real-time data and AI compute engine, Barracuda significantly improved its already fast data lake query performance, reducing query response times for archival emails by up to 100x.

“ It's not just about downloading emails. Sometimes, you just want to open a message and check what's inside. If that doesn't happen in near real-time, the customer is already gone.

Kevin Haggard, Vice President of Engineering, Barracuda

30x Faster Audit Log Queries

Barracuda's audit log was originally built on a high-throughput architecture. As usage grew, the system required a more scalable approach to managing append-only data efficiently while still accommodating reliable querying.

The team needed a better way to handle their "append-only" audit logs--data that's written once and referenced later.

With Spice.ai's data lake acceleration, Barracuda is moving from Cassandra to a Firehose pipeline that writes logs directly to Parquet files in AWS S3, decoupling ingestion and analysis while improving reliability and query performance.

“ Spice lets us write logs as append-only data and deal with it later.

Darin Douglass, Principal Engineer, Barracuda

Consolidation of Multiple Data Operations into a Single Runtime

Barracuda has increased mission-critical stability and developer productivity with Spice.ai OSS.

Prior to Spice.ai, Barracuda's team managed a broad toolset, including Databricks for data processing, Elasticsearch for acceleration, and Cassandra for logs. While powerful, this approach introduced operational complexity and required additional effort to stitch systems together.

The team experimented with Arrow and DuckDB, but they required significant customization.

Spice.ai, on the other hand, simplified the stack. Its pod-based architecture combined data querying, model inference, and retrieval in one lightweight runtime. The team could now federate SQL queries, run fast queries on Parquet files, and integrate with existing data sources--all without having to manage multiple tools.

“ The developer productivity boost was immediate. Spice removed the friction of juggling multiple tools.

Kevin Haggard, Vice President of Engineering, Barracuda

The move from Cassandra to S3-based Parquet files improved system reliability and eliminated a major point of operational risk, all while delivering faster performance.

“ It just spins up and works, which is really nice. The responsiveness is amazing, which is a huge gain for the customer.

Darin Douglass, Principal Engineer, Barracuda

50% Reduction in Operational Costs

Replacing multiple systems with a single Spice.ai runtime eliminated more than operational complexity -- it also reduced licensing and infrastructure overhead by 50%.

“ Spice's fixed-cost model and flexibility exceeded our expectations. It's a win-win. We're saving money and getting better results.

Kevin Haggard, Vice President of Engineering, Barracuda

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About Spice AI

Spice.ai is an open-source, Rust-based data and AI platform that gives agents their own self-contained data stack, and development teams a single SQL endpoint to federate and accelerate queries across data lakes, warehouses, and databases. It's lightweight enough that you can deploy it anywhere - at the edge, as a sidecar next to an application, on-premise, or in the fully managed Spice Cloud Platform.

About Barracuda

Barracuda is a leading global cybersecurity company delivering complete resilience made easy to buy, deploy and use through a partner-first model. Our intelligent BarracudaONE platform provides cyber resilience across email, data, applications, networks, and managed XDR within an open ecosystem. Trusted by hundreds of thousands of organizations and partners worldwide, Barracuda delivers industry-leading solutions and support, powered by people and enhanced by AI, for all size business.