Bacula Enterprise: Unique Features for MSPs, Cloud Providers, Hosting Companies, IaaS and BaaS Businesses.
Bacula’s latest version delivers a range of unique features for MSP’s, Cloud Providers, Hosting companies, IaaS and BaaS businesses, which can help them to:
- Expand on their services to their end-users
- Delegate backup and recovery tasks more easily
- Add Xen and Proxmox to their automated backup and recovery virtual environments
- Benefit from improved MSSQL backup and recovery integration, to add to the database integration portfolio of MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SAP HANA and many others
Can you sell Backup as a Service?
Today’s MSPs, hosting companies, BaaS and Cloud Providers are required to constantly develop, transform and innovate in order to remain competitive and attractive to customers. Bacula Enterprise 10 offers a number of unique and compelling benefits to MSPs, including tools for self-service backup, comprehensive REST API capabilities, massive range of virtual machine and database integration, advanced deduplication and compression tools, state of the art security built into every layer, snapshot management and a range of both GUI and text interfaces. All of this – and much, much more, is available with Bacula’s incredibly flexibly licensing, and without charging by data volume.
Here are just some of Version 10’s new features:
BCloud Service
BCloud Service is a simple user-oriented web front-end for backup and recovery tasks. As a multi-tenant backup solution, it is designed to safely delegate straightforward and restricted backup administrator tasks to an end user that may not be required to have high level permissions or have access to the whole backup system. ISPs and web hosting companies can use BCloud Service to offer self-service backup, by enabling their own customers to easily create and manage their own backup jobs, restore files, do LDAP authentication and much more. It has specific functionalities designed for Hosting and Cloud companies, and comprehensive information specifically about BCloud Service can be found in this whitepaper.
BCloud Service utilizes Bacula’s REST-API to allow third person users (for example, junior administrators, or customers of MSPs) to utilize only a given portion of Bacula’s underlying backup infrastructure. It is designed to easily translate to different panels. Being user-oriented, it is simplified to be fast and efficient to use. Using Bacula, hosting companies and Backup as a Service providers can exploit specialized tools thatlimit the size and scope of a customer’s self-service backup and recovery.
Some of BCloud Service’s features are:
- Display of amount of data used / available
- Schedule-setting and scheduled intervals
- Monitoring of backup and restore jobs, including Job Name, Level, Start Time, Duration, Job Files, Job Bytes, Average Speed, Errors and Status
- Drag and drop file restore
- Client Protection Status (Client Host Status Information)
- Backup and restore history, grouped by client
- Job (s) status, grouped by client
- Cancel running jobs
- Job logs
- System administrator can customize BCloud Service using php hook scripts
- System administrator can limit the number of Clients, Jobs, Schedules and Pool size per user
- Users are authenticated via LDA and can add and schedule their own backup jobs; register their own clients; start, monitor or abort backup/restore jobs and much more
Xen Backup and Recovery: Ease and Speed
Bacula Systems’ technology for backing up and recovering data from Xen servers brings never-seen-before speed and convenience to Xen users, all designed to make your life easier and with no intermediate steps required. It is part of Bacula’s VM Performance Suite that also has advanced technologies for backing up VMware, Hyper V, KVM and Proxmox.
Bacula Enterprises’ native integration with Xen provides virtual machine bare metal recovery, while its ability to back up data at the guest level simplifies data protection of critical applications. Backup can be performed for a guest VM in any power state (running or halted).
Bacula uses the Xen Server API to access and backup virtual machines. It brings a broad range of features, capabilities and automation to the Xen environment:
- Snapshot-based online backup of any guest VM
- VSS-based guest snapshots for quiescing VSS-based applications
- Full image-level backup
- Ability to restore complete virtual machine image
- Ability to restore VM archive (.xva) to alternate directory
- Full restore job logs
It also displays useful information about available XenServer resources, which could simplify your backup configuration and restore operations, such as:
- List of guest VM name-labels
- List of guest VM UUIDs
- List of XenServer Storage Repositories
Proxmox Backup and Recovery: Ease and Speed
Bacula Enterprise’s unique compatibility with diverse types of virtual environments also includes Proxmox. Bacula enables true enterprise-grade backup and recovery of the Proxmox open-source server virtualization environment. It makes Proxmox backup and restore operations as fast and simple as possible, and brings all the advantages of Bacula’s especially broad feature set to benefit the user with increased operational efficiency and reduced costs.
Proxmox VE is a powerful and lightweight open source server virtualization software, optimized for performance and usability. Offering maximum flexibility and using the Proxmox API, Bacula is fully integrated and can back up and recover data from Proxmox, including its two virtualization technologies – Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and container-based virtualization with Linux Containers (LXC) – and / or QEMU virtual machines.
Here are some of its features:
- Snapshot-based online backup of any VM including QEMU and LXC Guests
- Full image-level backup
- Restore complete virtual machine image to original or alternate Proxmox hypervisor
- Restore QEMU VM archive (.vma) to alternate directory
- Restore LXC VM archive (.tar) and configuration to alternate directory
REST API
The Bacula Enterprise REST API has been updated. MSPs and Cloud providers can now deploy highly customized services. Bacula’s REST API now supports the following new features:
- Run job
- Cancel job
- Run restore
- Update Bvfs cache
- Bvfs lsdir command
- Bvfs lsfiles command
- Bvfs restore command
- Bvfs file version list
- Set Bacula config files through BWeb/BConfig interface
- Commit BWeb workset changes
- List Schedule resources
- List Storage resources
- List Pool resources
Global Endpoint Deduplication Quiesce Command
Bacula Systems’ Global Endpoint Deduplication™ is built into Bacula Enterprise and is an enterprise endpoint backup technology that gives MSPs the choice to apply it either to the client side (file daemon) thereby saving network and storage resources, or at the storage level depending on how the user wants to manage the data; This gives the benefits of both global and endpoint deduplication.
IT is also possible to combine this ‘dedupe’ at the client side with Bacula Enterprise’s comm line compression feature to allow even better management and lower bandwidth consumption. It is now possible to quiesce the Global Endpoint Deduplication Engine to safely copy the data without shutting down the Storage Daemon. The commands quiesce and unquiesce enable a user to freeze and un-freeze the Global Endpoint Deduplication Engine on demand.
New Prune Command Option
The bconsole “prune” command can now run the pruning algorithm on all volumes from a Pool or on all Pools
MSSQL Plugin
Bacula offers fast and convenient backup and recovery for MSSQL. It can precisely backup very large amounts of specific Windows-based data in your SQL Server at a fraction of competitors’ costs – and achieve Point In Time SQL Server restore. A new checksum command and restore option has been added to ask the SQL Server to verify the checksum of the data during the backup or the restore.
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