AUSL Romagna Relies on Bacula Backup and Data Recovery
David Deriu
Systems Engineer, AUSL Romagna
«Deploying Bacula Enterprise was very fast: initial planning through deployment took just one month. Our previous solution – HP Data Protector – had taken about 6 months. Bacula Enterprise allows us to perform incremental, differential and delta backups every day and only a full backup once a month. In addition, it is much easier to control the backup – you simply have to check your e-mail!»
About AUSL Romagna
AUSL Romagna is the public healthcare institution of the department (provincia) of Rimini. It manages 4 hospitals plus 30 remote sites (surgeries, remedies, administrative offices). It has more than 4000 employees and 2000 PC’s.
The Challenge
AUSL Romagna’s previous backup solution was HP Data Protector; which meant that AUSL Rimini had to perform full backups every day. This took too long, and the IT team encountered difficulties in restoring files. Sometimes it even blocked. In addition, it was necessary to code a lot of scripts. These problems had to be resolved in order to have a satisfactory and dependable backup solution. In short, AUSL Romagna needed to improve its backup and restore system, and find a more realistic and simpler way to check and monitor its backup process.
The Solution
AUSL Romagna carefully evaluated IBM Tivoli but found it to be prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, Bacula Enterprise was proposed by AUSL Romagna’s partner SOASI. The AUSL Romagna team trusted SOASI‘s experience with Bacula Enterprise and decided to do a full assessment. SOASI were able to demonstrate Bacula Enterprise’s advantages compared with the existing solution: only a full backup per month was needed, management was much simpler, less tapes were used and disc space was significantly reduced. Therefore, after a successful evaluation of Bacula, AUSL Romagna made its decision to migrate away from HP Data Protector and deploy Bacula Enterprise.
Below is a brief description of AUSL Romagna’s new backup environment with Bacula Systems and SOASI:
- 34Tb of data to backup
- 130 servers (Windows 2000/2003/2008, RHEL 4/5, Debian, CentOS 5/6), half of these are virtualized with VMware
- Databases: Oracle, MS SQL 2008, MySQL
- Applications: many medical reporting ones, Business Objects, Data warehouse, Lotus Notes
- Storage: VNX 5300 (EMC)
- Tape libraries: HP Storageworks 1/8 G2, IBM TS3100
The Results
AUSL Romagna relies on Bacula backup and data recovery. Deploying Bacula Enterprise was very fast: initial planning through to deployment took just one month. With the previous solution (HP Data Protector) it had taken about 6 months. AUSL Romagna has found Bacula Enterprise to be a much simpler backup solution than HP Data Protector, allowing the IT department to perform incremental and differential backups every day and only a full backup once a month. “In addition, it is much easier to control backup – you simply have to check your e-mail!”, said David Deriu, Systems Engineer, AUSL Romagna.
“With HP’s backup system, we needed one person to be fully dedicated to backup activity, while now it takes only a fraction of my time” said Deriu. “With HP we could perform only full backups, and this meant 12/13 hours a day. Now, performing a full backup once a month, our daily backup activity is reduced to just 3-4 hours. And adding the Delta plugin has enhanced that performance even more. We leverage it particularly on the Lotus Domino platform”, added Deriu.
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