Case Study: CINES achieves reliable, scalable and cost-effective 150 TB backups with Bacula Systems' Enterprise Edition

CINES Chooses Bacula Enterprise Edition

CINES (Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur) needed to renew its backup and recovery platform to support HPC, long‑term archiving and nationwide hosting. Their incumbent solution was stable but used a complex, usage‑based licensing model that made costs and compliance unpredictable. After a tender process CINES selected Bacula Systems’ Bacula Enterprise Edition for its technical fit and clearer, simpler licensing.

Bacula Systems deployed Bacula Enterprise Edition on a physical server (10GbE, SSD RAID spooling) to protect about 150 workstations/servers and roughly 150 TB of retained data, writing to shared robotics with IBM 3592 E06 and LTO4 cartridges. Implementation included one‑week onsite installation, configuration, Administrator I/II training and ongoing support (via Bacula Systems and reseller Teicée). The open‑source‑based solution delivered flexible LVM snapshot workflows without stopping production, faster deployments, and predictable pricing — CINES reports Bacula was about 2× cheaper than the next option and up to 25× cheaper than the most expensive alternative, while proving reliable, scalable and customizable.

CINES

Jérôme Chapelle

CINES