Announcing Bacula’s OpenStack backup module.
Comprehensive backup and recovery for 
Bacula Enterprise has deep capabilities in its ability to back up and restore OpenStack environments and gives users the ability to perform advanced backup and fast recovery of OpenStack.
Bacula offers a choice of different ways to back up OpenStack elements, hypervisors, data and applications. Unlike other backup vendors, Bacula – just as it does with its backup of other hypervisors – offers a higher level of flexibility and scalability regarding Openstack protection.
OpenStack users can now use Bacula for:
- Full and Incremental Instance volume backup
- High flexibility, via both File Deamon and agentless backup
- Full integration with the OpenStack environment, simultaneously accessing all the features and capabilities of Bacula’s broad, highly secure enterprise backup and recovery solution.
- Snapshot-based backup – for hot and consistent backups
- Agentless deployment
- Backup of volumes attached to Instances
Bacula has an especially wide range of technology compatibility compared to other vendors
Bacula provides comprehensive support for S3 objects, Swift storage integration, cloud S3 storage, and Cinder volumes , therefore offering a unique and robust solution for protecting OpenStack environments. This scope of capabilities significantly enhances the potential for data protection across the entire OpenStack ecosystem and adds key benefits:
- Native Swift Storage Integration: Direct integration with OpenStack Swift, as opposed to just S3-compatible access, enables more seamless and efficient backups of object storage in native OpenStack environments. This ensures that metadata, versioning, and storage policies specific to Swift are fully honored, leading to optimized backups, faster restores, and more complete data protection for environments heavily reliant on Swift for unstructured data.
- Cross-Cloud and Hybrid Backup Capabilities: The ability to integrate with both native cloud S3 storage and Swift storage means that the backup solution can support diverse storage needs across public and private clouds. This hybrid support facilitates greater flexibility for disaster recovery, allowing organizations to store backups in alternative clouds or data centers while ensuring compatibility and accessibility, which is particularly useful in multi-cloud or hybrid setups.
- Cinder Volume Backup Support: OpenStack Cinder volumes are essential for block storage in OpenStack, typically holding critical application and workload data. Bacula support for Cinder volumes provides the capability to capture consistent snapshots of virtual machines, databases, and applications. This is invaluable for ensuring business continuity and enabling efficient recovery of stateful applications, as well as supporting quick restores at the block level.
- Comprehensive Data Protection and Simplified Management: Bacula’s single backup solution for OpenStack integrates with S3, Swift, and Cinder, simplifying the management of backup policies and workflows. It allows for centralized control, easier policy enforcement, and consistency across various types of data storage in OpenStack, ultimately reducing the complexity of managing multiple tools and workflows for each storage type. Critically, Bacula especially high levels of security mean that it offers OpenStack users the opportunity to take their OpenStack environments up to an unusually high level of protection over and beyond that of other solutions, which is a clear requirement in many professional organizations.
- Support of ALL key Virtual Machine Types: Bacula’s native integration into OpenStack’s key Virtual Machine-types means further advantages of deploying Bacula with OpenStack, such as:
- KVM – The dominant hypervisor in OpenStack, due to its open-source nature, performance, and deep integration with OpenStack components.
- QEMU – Often used alongside KVM for hardware emulation; it is a key component in OpenStack environments for compatibility with various hardware configurations.
- VMware vSphere/ESXi – Common in enterprises with existing VMware infrastructure, providing advanced features, high stability, and integration capabilities with OpenStack.
- Xen Server and XCP-ng – Used in specific deployments where performance and security are prioritized, though less common in recent years compared to KVM and VMware.
- Hyper-V – Favored in Microsoft-centric environments, allowing for integration with Windows services and applications within OpenStack.
Bacula’s comprehensive database support: Bacula’s native integration to MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL helps in protecting OpenStack’s core services due to compatibility, support, and optimization reasons.
By supporting S3, Swift, cloud storage, a vast range of virtual machine types, databases and Cinder volumes, Bacula’s open source-based solution provides a comprehensive, unified solution that covers data protection needs in OpenStack environments, making it a powerful tool for ensuring resilience and recoverability across both structured and unstructured data. This capability becomes especially relevant in medium and large organizations that require scalability, architectural flexibility, lower costs and ultra-high security.
Bacula has a vibrant, exciting and rapidly moving roadmap for new OpenStack protection. Would you like to get involved and benefit? Contact us for more information
