Rackspace (TriCore Solutions) Relies on Bacula Systems

The Challenge

With TriCore Solutions’ existing backup software, backup to tape was taking increasingly longer as its data center grew in size. TriCore Solutions was growing significantly month over month and accordingly, needed to keep adding additional tapes and drives for its tape library. It was getting progressively more difficult to keep backup-to-tape time short enough to be completed in a timely manner so that the tape company could move them offsite.

TriCore Solution’s environment is mostly HPE-oriented. As an HPE partner, it has HP DL380’s, HP DL 460’s (for the Enterprise servers), and an HP tape library with HP tape drives. All data backs up to an Infinidat SAN; Infinidat also being a TriCore Solution’s partner. Altogether, TriCore Solutions has well over a 1000 servers and is building additional servers at a rapid month pace.

A large percentage of TriCore’s environment is Linux, however it also has many Windows systems, running MS SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync servers. “We utilize several server systems. The core of what we do is Enterprise Business Suite hosting, as such we run applications including Oracle Enterprise Business Suite, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Business Intelligence solutions. Therefore, we have a lot of different applications that we have to backup” said Matt Iavarone, Manager, Systems and Storage at TriCore Solutions.

In addition to the difficulty of keeping backup-to-tape time within schedule parameters, there was another challenge: when backing up to tape, some of the larger database systems were taking too long and this situation was not optimum for some of TriCore Solution’s clients. TriCore Solutions therefore decided to resolve that problem, as well as make it easier to migrate data from tape to disk, by backing up to disk first, “The existing solution we had in place at that time would have been far too expensive to do that, costing over 250K to get a disk-based solution”, said Matt.

The Result

“At this point, our cost savings with Bacula Enterprise have been significant. Because the previous solution that we had was charging by disk volumes, it was more expensive. TriCore utilizes several licenses, with Bacula we were able to become more efficient and decrease costs”, said Matt.

“We were surprised at Bacula’s fast restore speeds, when we first did the testing. We were restoring groups of files in only one minute, where it used to take thirty minutes or an hour with the previous solution. We back up enormous amounts of data – and it goes really quickly; in just a few hours. Bacula’s compression is also really helpful, because it reduces network overhead. In addition, deduplication is saving us 60 to 80 TB of space. We find Bacula Director really simple to use, and the Bacula Console is very straightforward”, said Matt.

“Life is easier because Bacula is open source-based”, said Matt. “We have run into a couple of situations where, if we were working on a configuration and something is not working in the way we expect, we can look at the source and figure out exactly what that option should be doing. Also, we can look at different ways to utilize its flexibility: for example, we have just completed a Proof of Concept where, instead of going to tape with our disk backups, we migrate to Amazon Glacier. In the Bacula catalogue database, we customized a ‘comments table’ and modified it to what is called the ‘JSON data type’, so that we can take all our Amazon information, upload a volume from Amazon information and store it directly on the database. With other vendors we have worked with in the past, their database was proprietary and closed and we would never have been able to do that. We also would have had to have two databases in place.”

“Bacula’s Director makes it easy to access via a command line interface, and a database in the media table keeps track of all the on-disk volumes and the tape volumes that we use. That is where the comments column is, and we can use it for the Amazon data. So we now have a process that, once a backup completes, there is an option in the configuration of the Job to run a script. It is that script that starts the process for us, updating the database for each step of the process. We maintain all the JSON data: when it is time to do a restore, we just kick off a download from Amazon”, says Matt.

“Now we have done the POC for backing up to Amazon, and we are almost ready to put it into production. We expect to put the majority of our daily backups over to Glacier. Our ‘Full’ backups are typically over 200 TB’s, and copying all that data to tape can take two days to finish. When the ‘Daily’ then starts the day after, it just gets queued up behind the Full backups. And if a copy job fails, it could get further and further behind, and we would end up using more disk space. So taking the Daily’s and putting them in AWS will give us more opportunity to solve those issues.

“Because we offer Managed Services, we get many special requests from customers. One example of this would be where we have clients that have their financial systems hosted by us. Typically, these customers have different financial year-ends, sometimes at the end of March or at the end of September. Bacula makes it easy for us to change data retention times according to these customers’ calendar needs. So we can make sure that the data is retained for as long as is necessary.”