Play, Mobile Network Operator in Poland, Chooses Bacula

Play (P4 Sp. z o.o) is a consumer-focused mobile network operator in Poland with over 15 million subscribers.

The company provides mobile voice, messaging, data and video services for consumers and businesses (in particular SMEs) on a contract and prepaid basis under the umbrella brand Play. Its cost-efficient 2G/3G/4G LTE/5G telecommunications network covers 99% of the Polish population.

Since the commercial launch in 2007, Play has consistently developed its network and acquired clients to become the market leader in mobile services in Poland in 2017.

“We needed simplicity of backup and restore, access to advanced de-dupe technology, and a backup solution that could fit into our many different technologies and applications,” said Katarzyna Gupta, OSS operations manager, Play.

Challenge
“Originally, we had been looking for an Open Source Backup system for our environment. After testing a couple of solutions available on market, we found that Bacula Community fulfilled our requirements. Then, after a couple of years of using the Community version, our needs evolved further and we started looking for a commercial backup system for our cloud service to our vendors. Of course, such a solution would need to provide especially reliable backup of our cloud environment, but at the same time would also be simple to configure, backup and restore,” said Gupta.

“In addition to the importance of simplicity of backup & restore, access to advanced de-dupe technology was required to control storage space for backups. We also needed a backup solution that could fit into our many different technologies and applications,” she added.

Solution
“As we had a good experience with the Community version of Bacula, we decided to test Bacula Enterprise because of all the additional features it offers. And this is how we have came to find Inteos Sp. z o.o. who are system integration experts with Bacula Enterprise,” said Gupta. “Bacula answered our needs for having the possibility of multi-site replication, together with the simplicity of configuring backups and easily and quickly restoring backups.”

Result
“The time it took from initial planning, through development to deployment was quite fast, which was great,” said Mikołaj Oracz, senior specialist, Play. “We enjoyed really good support during the implementation and configuration phases from Inteos. We also received very good professional support from Bacula System’s Support Team. Now we are using Bacula for doing backup of both physical and VMs. We also do backup of various operating systems such as Debian, RedHat, and CentOS. And of course, we also have databases that are critical to backup such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.“

“We are quite satisfied with Bacula’s performance. It certainly fulfills our expectations. Now we are planning to implement backup replication to another site. As more and more backups are done with Bacula, we are regularly extending our system capacity in terms of storage. But at the same time, Bacula deduplication tools are nicely effective in reducing data volume. In addition, Bacula’s licensing model is advantageous as it does not charge by data volume. This makes it easier to forecast costs,” said Oracz.