Case Study: Turner Studios achieves secure 1.3PB SAN backups and reduced support costs with Bacula Systems

Turner Studios Relies on Bacula Enterprise Edition

Turner Studios, part of Time Warner and owner of brands across news, sports and entertainment, faced a fast-growing backup challenge: a 1.3 petabyte Hitachi SAN filled with very large video files (average file size ~600 GB) used for live, on‑air production. They needed a low‑cost, open‑source–friendly solution that provided granular control, easy customization, and reliable 24/7 support without the complexity and high pricing of traditional vendors — and chose Bacula Systems’ Bacula Enterprise Edition to meet those requirements.

Bacula Systems implemented Bacula Enterprise Edition (including the BWeb Management Suite and command‑line tools) with hands‑on support from its engineering team, completing deployment in about three months. The solution now backs up the 1.3 PB SAN in roughly a month, handles large 600 GB files reliably across Windows, Linux and Mac environments, enabled a critical restore that saved about a month’s worth of production work, and has lowered ongoing support costs for Turner Studios — delivering the control, performance and cost savings Turner needed.

Turner Studios

Andrue Netcher

Technical Supervisor, SportsCentral Engineering