Network security vendor Barracuda has announced an email gateway appliance to combat spam aimed at carriers and large enterprises.

Barracuda said the Spam Firewall 900 has more storage set aside for quarantine and faster throughput than rival appliances.

The 900 has 300GB of Raid 2 storage, four processors, dual Gigabit Ethernet connections and redundant hot-swap power supplies.

The 900 will be available in five models supporting from 1,000 to 25,000 active connections, with no per-user licensing fees. The appliance would typically be located in front of the email server. An Energize Update service updates the appliance every hour with the latest spam and virus signatures.

The 900 uses open-source anti-spam and antivirus systems and provides 10 layers of defence, including protection against denial-of-service, an IP address blocking list, virus checks with archive decompression, user-specified spam prevention rules, spam-fingerprint checks and rule-based scoring, according to the firm.

Paul Thackeray, Barracuda's European managing director, said, "IT administrators can import lists of signatures from open-source sites, like the Spamhaus Block List, and feed them into the appliance. Similarly, when the appliance finds a new signature, it can forward this to us for analysis, although governments tend to turn this feature off."

Barracuda's Spam Firewall 900 is available now priced at £25,000 + VAT for the hardware and then £5,345 + VAT per year for the Energize Update subscription service.