Nederlands
“Bacula handles our massive data volume effortlessly, and at significantly less cost that other solutions”
Ghent University is one of the largest Flemish universities, with around 44,000 students and 9,000 staff members. The University also supports the University Library and the University Hospital, which is one of the largest hospitals in Belgium. Ghent University consistently ranks among the top 100 universities in the world
The Challenge
The University of Ghent’s IT department was growing, as it expanded its services and capabilities. But there was a problem with data backup and recovery in terms of planning for future years: “We wanted to have reliable backups for a fair price. At the time (2010), we were using NetBackup, but because the cost was significant for us, we made the decision to migrate away from NetBackup. We stopped using it because the product became too expensive. This was mainly because the amount of data we needed to back up was growing continuously, and we needed to free ourselves from a volume-based pricing model” said Saskia Vandamme, System Administrator at the University of Ghent.
The Solution
“We first started using Bacula – the free version – about 10-12 years ago. Then, after a few years we decided to switch to Bacula’s Enterprise version, so that we could benefit from the additional modules and the expert support” said Saskia. “We chose to work with Bacula System’s local partner, Open Future, to help with implementation and also to benefit from having a local contact for Bacula Enterprise” said Saskia.
Gent University uses:
- SL3000 with 24 drives, 3000 slots. LTO5, 8 to 10 SD’s
- Isilon storage: 840TB (backup with NDMP module)
- Gpfs storage: 400TB
- Bacula Director running on Dell PowerEdge R730xd, RedHat 7.8
- Bacula storage daemons running on Dell PowerEdge R730xd, RedHat 7.8
- Catalog: postgres: 1,5TB running on PowerEdge R630
The Results
“We use Bacula to make backups of big data shares, which is diskspace that we offer to our users to share data, located on a 400TB GPFS system and a 1 PB Isilon Dell/EMC. In my experience, Bacula is faster to learn than any other product. When it comes to using it on a regular basis, in real-life situations, it is less complex than other solutions I have worked with. Another thing we appreciate here is that Bacula handles our massive data volume effortlessly, and at significantly less cost that other solutions. Open Future and Bacula have always given us great support, and we are happy with Bacula Enterprise’s performance”, said Saskia.
