Anti-spam Appliance - Barracuda, MailFoundry, Etc.

Does anyone have any experience to share concerning these devices?

I'm having some serious spam issues and would like to look into a better approach to preventing this than the typical SpamAssasin solution bundled with cPanel, Plesk and so on. SA seems rather inefficient, needs a lot of training, can get a lot of false positives, tends to break now and then, and so on.

Have any of you used either the Barracuda or the MailFoundry applicances, or even better - compared them first hand? Are there any similar solutions out there, perhaps cheaper/more cost effective in the long run?

$2000-3000+ for the hardware and around $500 a year for an anti-spam solution is a little steep in my opinion. Especially considering the old and cheap hardware for an example MailFoundry uses. How accurate they actually are in terms of false positives is also seemingly debated. MailFoundry promises a near 0 false positive rate, while some user-experiences suggest somewhere between 6-10% - which could represent an issue just as problematic as spam itself. Nobody wants to lose out on important email. To spend such an amount on a device and updates, it certainly needs to be worth it. Is it?

Are there any equally good or better software based solutions out there, that one could for an example use to set up a custom anti-spam server using existing hardware at the DC?