Case Study: TriCore Solutions achieves rapid restores, major cost and storage savings with Bacula Systems

TriCore Solutions Relies on Bacula Systems

TriCore Solutions, a managed application and hosting provider with an HPE‑centric data center of more than 1,000 servers, was facing ever‑longer backup‑to‑tape windows and rising costs as their environment grew. The existing solution was expensive to scale (a disk‑based replacement would have cost over $250K) and could not meet client SLAs for large database restores. To solve this, TriCore evaluated open‑source options and selected Bacula Systems, moving to Bacula Enterprise Edition and its plugins as a scalable disk‑first backup platform.

Bacula Systems implemented Bacula Enterprise Edition (including the Bacula Director and Oracle plugin), scaled out Storage daemons, and integrated deduplication, compression and custom catalog extensions to support migration to Amazon Glacier. The migration took about three weeks and delivered measurable benefits: restores that previously took 30–60 minutes now complete in ~1 minute for groups of files, deduplication saved roughly 60–80 TB (and 60–100 TB for Oracle backups), backups complete far faster, and licensing/capacity costs dropped significantly. TriCore also gained easier scalability (adding 1,000+ servers), simpler management, and a path to move daily backups to Glacier to further reduce tape-related delays.

TriCore Solutions

Matt Iavarone

Manager, Systems and Storage