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SDV Relies on Bacula Data Recovery

Salim Gasmi
CTO of SdV Plurimédia
«Bacula Systems Professional Services has allowed us to make the transition from proprietary backup software, and escape vendor lock-in. Its backup solution is safe, dependable, and delivers high performance. Bacula Systems support services are very high quality»

About SdV Plurimédia

Serving leading television, newspaper and media companies, SdV Plurimédia is a complete IT architect and integrator of networked IT and internet servers. With more than 1000 servers deployed, SdV Plurimédia provides expertise, hosting and other services for the design, creation and operation of Networked IT and lnternet servers. As SdV provides Internet solutions for high profile customers, including international firms such as BNPParibas and French daily newspapers including Le Figaro, it is essential that SdV ensures complete data backup, protection, and 24/7 uptime.

More information at http://www.sdv.net

The Challenge:

SdV increasingly found the licensing terms of its proprietary backup software inflexible, inhibiting its ability to scale to meet market demands.

With SdV’s rapidly growing business, the increasing costs of its existing backup software were becoming disproportional to the IT departments budget, and increasingly harder to justify in terms of value. “our existing backup architecture at the time was based on single server. We had grown to the point that it was a real bottleneck, regardless of what the hardware configuration was . We thus decided to have several backup servers”, said Salim Gasmi, CTO of SdV. The necessity of completing backups within a twenty-four hour backup window was simply no longer possible, and switching to multiple servers with their existing solution would have made costs even more unrealistic. In fact, any conceivable improvement to their existing backup system would have resulted in higher license costs. “We were trapped” commented Gasmi.

The Solution:

It was decided that multiple backup servers were the key to creating a far more effective backup solution, and Bacula was the key technology to enable it. A total switch-over to Bacula was agreed, together with an ambitious move to exploit Bacula’s huge scalability in the process. In the first stage of SdV’s re-architecture, ten backup servers were created, to allow backup capacity of well over one thousand data servers.

The Result:

From the beginning of the project, it was critical to SdV to be able to continue doing incremental backup six days per week and a full backup one day per week. For SdV, a typical incremental backup is 2Tbytes for 8 million files, and a full backup is 20Tbytes for 180 million files. Also important is SdV’s capability to be able to use Bacula to backup a much larger data capacity in the future, going well beyond a total backup capacity of 300Tbytes. The total migration time away from the old solution to Bacula was achieved in less than five weeks.

As a result of working with Bacula Systems to implement and optimize the finished solution, SdV’s backup time has been reduced to an amazing three hours.

“Another useful benefit is that we have been able to work with Bacula Systems to design our own customized interface, along with a specific reporting and monitoring tool” added Salim. In addition, we can use Bacula with added confidence as the catalog is stored on a comprehensive SQL standard open database of all files backed up. These benefits would not have been possible with proprietary software.”

SDV Relies on Bacula Data Recovery. Salim Gasmi said: “To my knowledge, Bacula is the only solution in the world where SdV can enjoy this level of functionality at these costs. For the business issues that face today’s data centers, Bacula’s amazing performance at such reasonable costs of deployment are the way forward. It contributes to SdV being one of the safest and most competitive data centers in France.”

Modules and Tools Adopted: