Well known and widely used by data centers around the world for delivering security, a highly stable product and no hidden or extra charges, Bacula Enterprise Edition is a particularly flexible data backup and restore solution, compatible with practically any form of storage – be it virtual, physical or Cloud.
As data volume in any given organization inevitably grows year over year, Bacula’s yearly subscription-based licensing has no data volume-based charges so IT departments can be completely free to back up and protect data in the way they choose. Bacula Systems pioneered this model and are virtually unique in that their whole business runs this way.
Bacula Systems provides its highly scalable backup and recovery software for medium and large organizations with from a few tens, to tens of thousands of servers or virtual machines. It is the leading Enterprise Open Core network backup and restore software company, combining Bacula’s enterprise-class open standard software with first-class support and professional services. The company is known in the industry for its commitment to provide MSPs and data centers with safe, secure and reliable data backup solutions.
Innovative SAP Solutions Offered by Bacula
For those who require it, Bacula provides native compatibility with SAP and SAP HANA. This is notable because the majority of SAP users are often constrained by proprietary, inflexible software vendors. Bacula represents something very different, providing SAP users with complete access to all of Bacula’s comprehensive, modular features within its backup and recovery platform, plus additional features for SAP. Its solution is certified by SAP which means data centers using SAP HANA can exploit Bacula’s flexibility to freely backup, recover, migrate, clone, replicate and copy data without being penalized for increased data volume by their backup software vendor. This means, data centers can employ an open source-based, highly scalable SAP HANA backup and recovery solution for their entire physical, virtual and cloud environments, regardless of architecture – all from a single platform. This makes corporate-wide data backup extremely cost-efficient and operationally convenient.
Bacula supports not only SAP HANA, but an unusually wide range of other databases. Backing up databases correctly in an IT infrastructure, which often have strict backup policy requirements, is crucial. With its database management system (DBMS) tools, Bacula’s technology sets the standard for enterprise-grade database backup software solutions that go far beyond its competitors.
All organizations are able to take advantage of Bacula’s especially powerful database backup tools. Providing ease and speed these database backup tools also givesystem administrators working to tight deadlines the answers they need. Databases such as MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and many, many more enjoy native support in Bacula, which provides heterogeneous client support as well as backup to clouds, disk, tape, and robotic media libraries.
Bacula uses a highly modular design with ‘Directors’, ‘Storage Daemons’, ‘File Daemons’, and a Catalog which gives an efficient and scaleable solution to almost every infrastructure environment accelerating data restore time while reducing costs. Additionally, Bacula enables its customers to manage storage requirements and minimize network bandwidth utilization through features such as Global Endpoint Deduplication and data compression. This deduplication process eliminates redundant data which in many cases can drastically reduce data volume. “All large data centers, including MSPs, hosting companies and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) companies need to tightly control operational costs” said Frank Barker, CEO of Bacula Systems. “Bacula is designed with high-end features to allow these MSPs and data centers to reduce costs, while simultaneously building out their services to users and customers to provide top level services and generate incremental revenue”.
The advantages of Bacula do not just end here. For example, its core Directory Server interoperability ensures ease of use to System Administrators and performs granular level backup to restore all or just one LDAP object.
Made for Compatibility in Different IT Environments
Bacula’s software is architected to offer an especially broad compatibility with diverse IT environments. This remarkable flexibility means that Bacula helps IT managers meet their required goals, without having to deal with the
inconvenient approaches imposed on them by legacy vendors.
Virtual Machines are to be found in most IT environments today, and Bacula’s VM Performance Backup Suite provides backup and replication for an impressively wide range of different hypervisor environments regardless of their size. Complementing Bacula’s VM Performance Backup Suite with its Global Endpoint Deduplication technology is the equivalent of putting a turbo charger onto an engine. The end result is that the solution – being highly customer driven – assists data centers to operate more quickly, and save even more time, money and other resources.
One of the ongoing challenges of the IT industry is the vast range of different and rapidly changing technologies: hardware, software applications, databases and operating systems that all have to be catered for in a backup and restore solution. Company mergers, acquisitions and consolidations make the situation even more dynamic. Bacula’s strength is that it is especially adaptable and customizable, so IT teams can back up all their systems from just one platform. This flexibility is critical as IT resources, personnel and budgets are usually limited.
One example is NASA: The technicians that implemented Bacula there stated: “Bacula Enterprise was the only product that worked with HPSS out-of-the-box without vendor development, provided multi-user access, had encryption compliant with Federal Information Processing Standards, did not include capacity-based licensing model, and was available within budget.”
Bacula’s open source roots and high profile customers are a key reason for it having developed such a flexible solution including state of the art security technologies. The company’s roadmap expands Bacula in line with evolving customer needs, with already impressive snapshot management, the broadest virtualization portfolio of any company, Deduplication , auto discovery, and predictive support. As the Cloud providers expand their offerings, Bacula Systems is about to announce Bacula Enterprise Edition 10, a major new version which among many new features will allow cloud providers and hosting companies to generate new revenue for themselves, by offering Bacula’s advanced capabilities to their own customers.
The Creative Minds Behind Bacula
While Bacula Systems’ philosophy is that the company is a team, all parts are interconnected and must work together on behalf of the customer, here are two of the Senior team.
Kern Sibbald was one of the founders of Autodesk (CAD company), from which he retired in the late 90’s. However he continued to develop software and was and is a major contributor to open source software. Looking for a solution to back up his own software he could not find any that were both open source, stable and that could scale up in large installations. He then started the Bacula project which quickly grew quickly in popularity with several million downloads. After being contacted by a very large bank looking for support of its Bacula installation, Kern realized that there were many large enterprises and research institutions using Bacula that needed support and special software features. To meet this growing need, he founded Bacula Systems in 2009.
Frank Barker became the CEO of Bacula Systems in 2012 and put the operational model and framework in place for Bacula Systems to grow quickly and reach profitability. With a strong team in Sales & Marketing, Frank invested further in Bacula’s engineering team; grew its Support Services organization with senior, experienced staff and invested more in the company’s training services and own personnel.
Frank has shaped the company with a special emphasis on outstanding customer service high quality software and a highly motivated team of professionals to sell to and support its customers worldwide.
