Case Study: Ghent University achieves scalable, low-cost petabyte backup and recovery with Bacula Systems

University of Ghent Benefits from Bacula

Ghent University, one of the largest Flemish universities with about 44,000 students and 9,000 staff, faced rapidly growing backup needs and rising costs under a volume‑based NetBackup license. Seeking reliable, future‑proof backups at a fair price, the university moved from NetBackup to Bacula Systems—initially adopting the free Bacula and later migrating to Bacula Enterprise.

Bacula Systems, together with local partner Open Future, implemented Bacula Enterprise (Director and storage daemons on Dell PowerEdge servers, NDMP for Isilon, SL3000 tape library, and a PostgreSQL catalog) to protect large GPFS and Isilon shares. The deployment now backs up a 400 TB GPFS and a 4 PB Isilon (catalog ~4.5 TB), handles massive volumes effortlessly, is quicker to learn and less complex in daily use, and delivers significantly lower costs and strong support compared with the previous solution.

Ghent University

Saskia Vandamme

System Administrator