Beginning in September, we began to quietly upgrade our backup system. The previous system worked well and never lost customer data. It was the perfect system when we purchased it in December 2005. It suffered a few problems, including slow startup restore times and a sad dependence on filesystem inodes for the indexing system. This led to scaling issues that would have drastically impacted us by mid-2008.

After a lengthy investigation into option, we decided to use NetVault from BakBone Software. The decision was made due to fulfilling specific criteria – native Linux client and server software, support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle hot backups, Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) capabilities, and the ability to implement quickly, very quickly. The last one was key to minimizing our costs for the implementation as we knew we would need to maintain the old system for a minimum of 60 days after the last server was migrated. This also led to RedHat and Bakbone producing a case study.

Feel free to read it here.