SC24: Bacula Backup and Recovery Software V.18.2 with HPC Features

At SC24, expanding its leadership in high security, backup and recovery for HPC and other demanding IT environments, Bacula Systems SA announced a host of new features in the latest version of its backup and recovery software.

Version 18.2 introduces features that enhance Bacula’s ability to support backup across a wide variety of different VM-types. This comes as the industry continues its shift towards more economical alternatives to traditional VM’s.

“This latest Bacula release underscores its unique ability to handle backups for numerous VM types, enabling organizations to boost security, comply with regulatory demands, and achieve substantial cost savings,” said Frank Barker, CEO, Bacula Systems.

The new features in Version 18.2 further strengthen Bacula’s top-tier security capabilities while enhancing its adaptability to meet the demands of complex IT environments-especially in terms of supporting various VM types and workloads. Its broad hybrid cloud qualities are now expanded with Lock function, immutability synchronization and storage class function for all cloud providers.

The company’s advanced security features a number of security tools, such as data poisoning detection, centralized encryption, FIPS 140-3 compliance, and an extensive cybersecurity dashboard for single-pane security control. The solution offers advanced backup and recovery capabilities for the following VMs: Nutanix, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, XCP-ng, RHV and OpenStack. XCP-ng support includes Secure mode.

Version 18.2 offers single item restore to all hypervisor plugins.
It also delivers Hypervisor to Cloud (EC2) conversion capabilities, a feature that provides the ability to send On-Premise backed-up VMs to the cloud to avoid lock-in situations with Hypervisor vendors and to help with migration strategies.

Increased Hyper-V capabilities
Bacula’s latest version offers the following enhancements for Hyper-V WinAPI to complement its ability to backup VMs in an agentless manner:

• Support for any kind of deployment (standalone or clustered)
• Advanced boot handling (UEFI based systems, device order management)
• Full, Differential or Incremental backup
• Data directly streamed from the source to the destination storage without the need of reserving any space on the backup agent running the process.

Version 18.2 makes further additions to its Kubernetes module, adding intelligence to select automatically the better backup mode or to protect additional services within a cluster such as the Ingress resource manager, among other improvements to increase its flexibility to support any kind of Kubernetes deployment.

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Applications and databases additions include:

• Amazon Relational Database (RDS) Plugin: It is now possible to not only orchestrate Database as a Service backups in Amazon cloud, but also to extract the data and have it available OnPremise for increased protection or for migration purposes.
• M365 Plugin improvements: SharePoint module now has page-level recovery capabilities. Exchange module can now export its data to PST format and the new Activity module was added to protect logs on the actions performed on the Cloud service, which complements one of the most comprehensive M365 solutions in the industry.

HPC leadership
Bacula’s dominance in the HPC space is underlined by its remarkable scalability, Quobyte support and efficiency improvements to Bacula’s Big File Split module, which accelerates the backup of environments with billions of files. ZFS advanced support, through high performance design, will soon be available. In addition, the company has further developed its renowned Deduplication capability, with new and more powerful scan and recovery tools.

“Bacula offers licensing without capacity limits, supports 34 different operating systems, leads the industry in security, scales extensively, provides in-cloud functionality, and is compatible with more hypervisor and container types than any other backup provider. Its unmatched flexibility delivers significant advantages for our military, government, e-commerce, ISV, and HPC clients” said Jorge Gea, CTO, Bacula Systems.