Case Study: Rackspace achieves fast, scalable backup and restore performance with Bacula Systems

Rackspace (TriCore Solutions) Relies on Bacula Systems

Rackspace, through TriCore Solutions, needed a faster and more scalable way to back up a rapidly growing environment of more than 1,000 servers. Their previous backup-to-tape approach was taking too long, especially for large databases and offsite tape handling, so they looked for a more cost-effective disk-based option. Bacula Systems was evaluated as an open source-based backup solution with the scalability and lower entry costs they needed.

Bacula Systems implemented Bacula Enterprise with the Oracle plugin, VMware/NDMP support, and global endpoint deduplication. The migration went smoothly in about three weeks, and the results were substantial: restore times dropped from 30–60 minutes to about one minute, backups completed in just a few hours, and deduplication saved 60–80 TB of space while compression reduced network overhead. Bacula Systems also helped Rackspace/TriCore improve retention flexibility and prepare for moving daily backups to Amazon Glacier.

Rackspace

Matt Iavarone

Manager, Systems and Storage