Bacula Systems
Enterprise Open Core Solution for Backup and Data Recovery

At a time when many backup and data restore vendors are struggling with their ownership structures, or to be profitable, or grow and deliver new technology to the industry, Bacula Systems is going from strength to strength. Its aim is to bring the very best backup and restore technology into data centers, MSPs and Cloud providers, while at the same time helping its customers to control expenses. Based on its growth, this appears to be a winning combination. Featuring data de-duplication, snapshots and advanced virtual machine backup and data recovery—Bacula Systems makes sure its robust solutions directly address real customer needs.

The company also offers a comprehensive GUI management suite, BWeb, which has a wide range of features for deploying, managing, reporting and optimizing data recovery and backup, to meet ever-shortening recovery time objectives. “The suite’s simple and easy-to-use workflow restores complex and urgent data in a couple of clicks, enabling our clients to rapidly exploit the large-enterprise capabilities of Bacula Enterprise Edition,” says Frank Barker, CEO, Bacula Systems.

Bacula is applied to physical and virtual environments alike, enabling entire data centers to be fully protected from a single platform. To bring further options and performance gains to virtual machines, Bacula provides its VM Performance Backup Suite. According to Barker, Bacula has backup and replication for any hypervisor, but the reason the suite is called ‘VM Performance Backup’ is because of its speed in specific tasks—including Single File Restores. The firm provides ‘Global Endpoint De-duplication,’ a particularly advanced form of de-duplication that excels on both the client and storage side, with the additional benefit of optimizing network performance. Bacula also offers solutions to disk data erosion, silent data corruption, or other time or intrusion sensitive events with its unique data verification capabilities.

Bacula’s modern, modular, single software architecture platform has a multi-threaded design that helps its customers enhance their system performance.

We significantly reduce the TCO for our customers’ backup and storage requirements

For instance, Sky—Europe’s leading entertainment company, which is serving 21 million customers—needed a modern backup and restore solution to sustain its data volume growth and meet operational requirements. With Bacula Enterprise Edition, Sky received a great virtual and physical backup solution, fast restores and agility in an environment where uptime is paramount. “Bacula included plug-ins which allowed us room for growth, enabling further flexibility and options to work with,” says Jonathan Kernan, DevOps System Engineer at Sky.

What makes Bacula Systems standout? "Three things", says Barker. "Firstly, our product has the functionality and capability needed for the most demanding enterprise or MSP, with high scalability, performance and reliability. Secondly, we compliment this with outstanding support, reflected with an almost 100 percent customer retention rate since the start of the company. Thirdly, our business model is and always has been subscription based with no data volume charges. This reduces customers’ upfront and ongoing costs, and knowing that they are not locked in by license fees means we are incented to up our game in terms of functionality and support to ensure they remain customers." Bacula Systems is the brainchild of Kern Sibbald, one of the founders and developers of Autodesk, who thought a more modern architecture was needed in backup technology. With a global customer base that includes some of the world’s largest enterprises, MSPs, governments, banks, aerospace and defense companies, Bacula is an increasingly popular replacement for traditional and expensive solutions.

“Our advantage is that we significantly reduce the TCO for our customers’ backup and storage requirements with a product and support that means our customers can sleep at night,” concludes Barker.