Bank of Austria
The Challenge
Bank Austria / WAVE originally used Legato on Solaris for backup. With the full hardware solution that they were using at that time, it used to take up to a whole day to do a backup.
Bank Austria decided therefore that consolidating backup jobs into an enterprise-class tape library was required, but their current software supplier then demanded a license for the entire library – which would cost around 250K Euros – when only 20-30 slots out of 200 would actually be used for the systems in question.
The Solution
The complete evaluation process took 3-4 months. But early on during the appraisal of Bacula, the Wave technicians became confident that it was without doubt the best solution, using it together with OpenSolaris, and finding the Bacula solution mature, well-proven, and with a large user base.
“The fact that we could access and look into Bacula’s code ourselves whenever we wanted quickly brought us a high level of confidence with the quality of the product”, said Martin Angebrandt, Senior System Manager. “With Bacula, it’s relatively easy to split libraries, and this was one of our main intentions, because smaller libraries cost less to backup. So we were able to reduce costs in hardware too, by taking advantage of Bacula’s configuration capabilities”.
Martin added: “Kern – Bacula’s lead developer – is a very honest and down-to-earth man who tells it like it is – there’s no embellishment of the facts with him. We also found Bacula’s documentation to be extremely good, far better even than most proprietary solutions.
The Result
“With Bacula, we are not dependent on some far-away helpdesk in another continent, which could take hours to respond. Bacula’s support is very responsive. Our solution represents a highly tested and proven PostgreSQL setup that works extremely effectively. WAVE actually has the ability to perform in-house tests and benchmarks: “we take that kind of thing very seriously”, Martin said. So we have been able to test Bacula and benchmark it. It comfortably passed all our requirements. Bacula has done a great job for us”.
Martin added: “Bacula also allows us to do configuration checks, and checksum checks, and this enables us to guarantee data integrity. It also means we can meet international regulations for required checks. We have found Bacula’s software’s modular architecture to be very solid, and the actual code is of really high quality. We especially appreciated Bacula’s design and modern, advanced conceptual qualities. Much additional possible functionality is built in as a foundation but not always fully implemented, and this brings a great flexibility. We have found that robotics is well integrated into the software and tape handling is comprehensive in features.
Klaus said “The support we have received from Bacula has been perfect. Simply put: Bacula is the only Open Core solution that could give us the demanding levels of performance we require. Our cost savings have been huge”.
You may also be interested in:
