Flexible backup for large-scale environments

Bats in the Data Center

A network of universities (Universities of Ulm, Constance, and Tübingen, Germany) was looking for a new backup solution, but the requirements were tough. The new solution not only had to offer a simple and predictable license model, it also had to cope with billions of files and petabytes of data in all kinds of international character sets on thousands of computers with all kinds of operating systems at several locations in the country. Open and documented formats and interfaces were essential to ensure permanent, at least read-only, access to the data, and it had to allow the continued use of existing tape drives, including a large tape library.

In the end, the people in charge opted for a proof of concept based on Bacula Enterprise Edition [1] by Switzerland's Bacula Systems [2] and, by doing so, for a combination of open source software with extension modules and commercial support.

Starting Point

The backup software originally used was IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager [3]. However, a review revealed that the license costs were difficult to calculate, with no central overview of how many CPUs were included in the backup in the individual decentralized systems in the branch offices and the data volume allowed for each CPU. Moreover, the figures could potentially change at any time. Inventorying the hardware data and constantly updating the figures looked like a very labor-intensive and time-consuming task, which is why license models by volume or processor performance are not a good fit for university operations.

The current hardware comprises two x86 servers running Solaris 11.4, which have access to three collections of hard drives (just a bunch of disks, JBODs). Each array comprises 90 SAS2 disks connected by several

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