Case Study: NASA Langley achieves seamless HPSS integration, FIPS‑compliant encrypted backups, and cost savings with Bacula Systems' Bacula Enterprise

NASA Chooses Bacula Enterprise to Back Up IBM HPSS

NASA Langley (NASA) needed to replace SyncSort Backup Express to back up roughly 250 TB from ~300 scientific and mission-support systems into an IBM HPSS hierarchical storage manager. After evaluating several vendors, NASA selected Bacula Systems — deploying the Bacula Enterprise product — because it provided out-of-the-box HPSS integration, multi-user web access (BWeb), FIPS-compliant encryption, no capacity-based licensing, and fit the budget.

Bacula Systems implemented Bacula Enterprise over about four months, migrating clients and tape media and integrating SAN transfers, centralized web management, encrypted backups, and Bare Metal Recovery. The deployment now supports ~300 TB client-side and ~750 TB server-side with 1.5 PB of disk volumes presented to HPSS (225 GB Bacula catalog), manages multiple libraries (including an additional 24-tape LTO-4), added 200 client licenses plus plugins (MySQL, BMR), reduced I/O and disk use during volume purges, and delivered cost savings versus renewing SyncSort — demonstrating clear operational and financial benefits.

NASA

Gustaf J Barkstrom

Systems Administrator