Case Study: Columbia University achieves high availability and 90% spam reduction for Exchange with Barracuda Networks

Building Scalable And Fault Tolerant Exchange Deployments At Columbia University

Columbia University’s Advanced Computing Research Support (ARCS) group, supporting about 300 users across five local email domains, ran an Exchange server directly on the Internet with no anti‑spam protection. Rising volumes of spam were slowing Exchange and hurting productivity, so ARCS needed an effective, reliable way to reduce spam and improve mail server performance.

ARCS deployed two Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall 400s for high availability and later added two Barracuda 440 Load Balancers for redundancy. Within a month the firewalls flagged roughly 90% of incoming mail as spam, cutting bandwidth and offloading Exchange; the load balancers provided seamless failover and easier server maintenance. The combined solution delivered sustained performance gains, simplified operations, and dependable vendor support over several years.

Columbia University

Paul Glick

Technical Engineer