DPD Ireland

Stefan Ajderev

Technical Team Leader at DPD Ireland

«When we changed to Bacula Enterprise, we realized just how good it was»

The Challenge

As Ireland’s largest dedicated parcel delivery company, DPD needed a safe and highly reliable backup and data recovery solution. “We had got to know Bacula through using the Bacula Community version. We liked it because it is open source and Linux-based. That worked well for us for a while, but then the person driving that project left the company, and there was no longer anyone available with knowledge of how to run Bacula community version”, said Stefan Ajderev, Technical Team Leader at DPD Ireland.

“Around the same time, we had a failure on one of our backup servers, and we were not able to rebuild it by ourselves. When we realized that we wanted additional help, we talked for some time with management about our choices. Then the server went down, and it became critical. We were in an emergency situation, but Bacula Systems gave a really quick reaction and we were pleased with the whole process – we were put straight through to a senior technical person, who quickly helped us to restore the server” said Stefan.

The Solution

When DPD suffered its machine failure and needed to get professional support from Bacula Systems, help was immediately on hand to ensure a full and immediate recovery. It became clear that Bacula Enterprise was the most attractive choice for DPD’s backup and data recovery software. “We did look around to check out different options, but what we saw was that Bacula was a really stable product and very flexible too. Overall, Bacula Enterprise was of considerably lower cost than other similar offerings on the market; the other vendors just did not have a flexible enough product and were about twice as expensive” said Stefan.

“The reasons were so compelling that we decided to get professional support from Bacula Systems – and, at the same time, benefit from Bacula Enterprise’s additional features. When we changed to Bacula Enterprise, we realized just how good it was. Its deduplication capability was also an unexpected and nice advantage for us. Altogether, the entire backup environment now runs a lot faster for us”, said Stefan.

DPD’s set up is quite straightforward: Bacula backs up during the night, and during the day, DPD migrate it to tape. It took just a couple of days to do a completely new installation of Bacula Enterprise.

But there were other advantages, too, with DPD taking advantage of Bacula’s web-based GUI, which can even be used at the same time and alongside Bacula’s command line interface. “Getting BWeb Management Suite together with Enterprise Edition made a nice difference for us, because by using BWeb, you don’t need much knowledge of how to run Bacula – yet it enables you to do all standard System Administrator tasks. As a result, most of our team are now using BWeb because of the time it saves them. However, for more advanced configurations, it is a real advantage to have the choice to use command line interface and some of us do indeed use it from time to time. So, for day-to-day tasks, we find BWeb is better. For more complicated tasks and customization, we find the command line interface to be really powerful” said Stefan.

The Result

“It really makes a big difference to get proper Bacula Systems support”, said Stefan. Plus, the software upgrade was a definite improvement” said Stefan. “Today, restore works much better. Typically, we only need to do a critical restore a couple of times per year and when you do not do it on a daily basis, it’s not always easy to figure out or remember how to do it via the command line interface. So now we also have the option to use BWeb, it takes us just a few clicks and it is all done very quickly and easily. It just works”, said Stefan.

“In critical situations, it is good to know that data recovery is now much faster. Users are also happier that they can have specific data restored practically immediately. Previously, we were putting too much time into it, and now it doesn’t take much time at all. We are pleased that everything works so well and even our backup window is shorter now, too” said Stefan.

About DPD Ireland

Interlink Ireland Ltd was founded in 1986 with 10 depots and a central hub based in Athlone, Co. Westmeath. We are now Ireland’s largest dedicated parcel delivery company with 33 depots throughout the country handling in excess of 19 million parcels per year.

In 2000, Interlink Ireland became part of GeoPost S.A., the parcels and express division of La Poste, the French Post Office. By 2006, business had grown to such an extent that the company committed €18 million to the development of a new hub and headquarters in Athlone.

In February 2008, Interlink Ireland changed its name to DPD. La Poste united its express parcel companies under one single brand – DPD – providing customers with one united, delivery partner throughout Europe and beyond.

In late 2016, DPD expanded further, doubling its hub size and trebling the sortation capacity from 7,000 parcels per hour, to 21,000 parcels per hour. The new Beumer cross belt sorter combined with the existing Van der Lande shoe sorter means that DPD has the most technologically advanced and efficient sortation system in Ireland.

Seen as one of the key innovators within the parcel delivery field, DPD’s technological developments like real time, on line track and trace, Predict™, DPD Parcel Wizard™ and the DPD Ireland App, have completely revolutionised how parcels are delivered. Constantly focused on the evolving needs of customer and consumer, DPD leads the field in parcel delivery technology.