Tape backup software has been used for a long time as one of the fundamental strategies for information protection in enterprise organizations. Despite some vendors stating that ‘tape is dead’, tape backup still continues to be a key technology in enterprise backup. The main reason for this is the sheer reliability of the backup tape. Continuing backup to tape modernization brings increasing performance and capacity, while lowering cost per GB of data stored. This has also allowed to obtain longer periods of validity of the stored data. Tape Backup to tape portability and ease of migration to other locations, remote or local, are important elements in the implementation of disaster recovery and high availability environments.
Many system administrators and IT directors discuss the pros and cons of both backup to tape and disk. However, a balanced backup and recovery strategy brings disk and tape backup solutions together. One of the examples of using tape backup solution is transferring the 60-180 days disk backups to (lower cost) tapes or even to low-cost disk and then tape (D2D2T).
Since its beginning in the year 2000, Bacula has used backup to tape as one of its fundamental features, embracing many different types of existing and emerging tape backup hardware.
Bacula Enterprise Edition is based on the Bacula community project (bacula.org) which was backup to tape software since its conception as one of the main media types. Supporting backup to tape has always been a #1 priority. Bacula Enterprise tape backup software is enterprise-ready. Our backup to tape is completely agnostic when it comes to drives, autoloaders and library models. This means that a large range of tape management solutions and systems are available to the Bacula user. The advantage of Bacula’s architecture is that, as long as the hardware can be accessed via mt/mtx commands, Bacula will be able to utilize it. This feature allows tape backup server to reuse tape units that could not be recognized by new tape backup solutions.
Bacula Enterprise Edition’s tape backup software implementation and production work is very simple and scalable; it doesn’t require additional licenses for custom configuration and scalability which results in significant savings of operational costs, without the surcharges for use of agent and new devices.
Bacula Enterprise Edition has fully integrated tape backup solutions in its core architecture. This includes autoloaders and Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL’s). One of the key differentiators of Bacula Enterprise Edition over other enterprise-level backup solutions is its compatibility with an especially wide range of drives, tape libraries and autoloaders that include different types of technologies, such as DDS, DLT, LTO, etc. and different manufacturers of the tape backup industry.
Here are just some libraries and autoloaders that are known to work with Bacula Enterprise Edition tape backup software:
Bacula Enterprise Edition brings management flexibility to your tape backup system with a variety of options: simple command line or powerful online interface — BWeb Management Suite.
The following tape drives are used in the above libraries and are known to work with Bacula Enterprise Edition tape backup solution:
Bacula Enterprise Edition also offers:
Further help on tape backup:
