DPD Ireland Deploys Bacula Enterprise Edition

Interlink Ireland Limited, trading as DPD Ireland, has deployed Bacula Enterprise Edition for backup and data recovery.

Challenge
As Ireland’s largest dedicated parcel delivery company, DPD needed a safe and 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, 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,” he added.

Solution
When DPD suffered its machine failure and needed to get professional support from Bacula, help was on hand to ensure a full and immediate recovery. Enterprise Edition 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 Ajderev.

“The reasons were so compelling that we decided to get professional support from Bacula Systems – and, at the same time, benefit from Bacula Enterprise Edition’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,” he added.

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

Result
“It really makes a big difference to get proper Bacula Systems support”, he commented. “Plus, the software upgrade was a definite improvement. 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.“

“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,” he concluded.