Bacula Releases 10:1 to 20:1 De-Dupe Optimized Volumes Feature

Bacula Systems SA, provider of commercial open source backup and restore software, announced the availability of its Deduplication Volumes feature, adding another component to Bacula Enterprise Edition v6.

The release continues company’s commitment to offering a scalable, modern, open source backup and restore solution for enterprises and MSPs, through accelerated development of the Bacula project, multiple plug-ins, and by delivering high quality professional support to the IT industry.

With this feature, Bacula Systems offers Universal Deduplication Volumes capabilities where the backup data is stored in a manner that permits any deduplicating storage device or file systems to remove redundant data.
 
The advantages of Deduplication Volumes lie in the reduction of storage space required to store data and the fact that storing data can be much faster since blocks of data are replaced by pointers to the existing location of the block stored on disk.

Bacula’s universal support for deduplicating systems means that inexpensive deduplication technologies that were previously unsuitable for backup data (ZFS, NetApp), can now be leveraged for backups, leading to cost savings. This feature also brings enterprises and MSPs a gain in resources and time.

Furthermore, this technology is included in Bacula Enterprise Edition without extra charge (starting at Silver subscription level) and is brought to the corporate world without capacity based licensing.

Deduplication Volumes is supported with:

• Nexenta Systems OpenStorage Appliances
• NetApp Data ONTAP 8.0.1 and higher
• Oracle / Sun ZFS Storage Appliances
• WhiteBearSolutions (WBSgo) WBSAirback Appliances
• ZFS on Linux (64-bit only)

"With this Deduplication Volumes feature and its universal aspect, Bacula Systems opens great possibilities to the many ZFS appliance vendors worldwide, to give their customers all the benefits of deduplication without the costs that were incurred until our announcement today," outlined Aristide Caraccio, VP sales and marketing, Bacula.

With Bacula now having passed the 2 million download milestone, more enterprise and MSPs have adopted Bacula Enterprise Edition.

On the OEM front, WhiteBearSolutions, SL (WBSgo) has chosen to include Deduplication Volumes feature into their Unified Storage System appliance offering: WBSAirback.

"With the new Bacula Enterprise Deduplication Volumes feature, the in-line deduplication capacity from WBSAirback Unified Storage module and the other functionalities integrated in the WBSAirback Enterprise Protection module based on Bacula Enterprise, we have an Enterprise Solution that enables our customers to reduce dramatically the TCO associated with data protection," says Ignacio Gilart, co-founder of WhiteBearSolutions.

"The time and difficulty of the work we had to go through have been nicely rewarded by the astounding reduction of disk space needed to store data that can be obtained by using Deduplication Volumes," said Kern Sibbald, CTO, Bacula.

"With our Universal Deduplication Volume solution we continue our strategy of positioning Bacula Enterprise Edition as the preeminent solution for enterprises and MSPs worldwide, and doing so at a fraction of the cost of traditional license based vendors. Today’s deduplication ratios are among the best in the industry, at a fraction of their cost, and we expect that advances in deduplication techniques as well as further enhancements to our code will produce even better results in the future," added Sibbald.