European public services rely on Bareos for backups

Quintillions of records

Published on: 17/01/2020 News Archived

European public services make up about half of all customers that pay for support services on Bareos, a backup solution available as open source. The software is used by universities across the continent, national and state archives, and municipalities small and large, reports Bareos, the 8-year-old company based in Cologne (Germany) that is the main developer of the eponymous software solution.

The company and its network of partners in European member states continue to sign up new public services as customers. In 2019, new users of Bareos included the town of Vera in Spain and Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany.

The growing number of commercial support contracts allows Bareos - the company - to employ a staff of 20, many of whom are software developers who work to improve the backup software’s capabilities. At the same time, the number of code contributions from outside is increasing, says Frank Kohler, VP business development at Bareos. A simple example is translations of the menu texts into various languages, but outside contributors have also committed code that lets Bareos plug into the Ceph distributed storage system.

Public services prefer to have contracts for support, says Mr Kohler. Such contracts cover support for installation, and advise on implementation and setting recovery goals. In addition, the company provides workshops and training.

Universities and research organisations are key Bareos users, says Mr Kohler: “For them, it’s easier to try open source tools such as Bareos. Once they start to rely on it, they contact us or one of our partners for professional support.” The software is used by large scientific institutions including Italy’s National Research Council, the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany) and the Department of Informatics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

The Nationaal Archief, which manages the records of the Dutch central government (and others), uses Bareos for its cloud storage (based on Gluster). A similar user is the Archives of the Bavarian State, based in Munich, Germany, which manages the records generated by the state administration.