Barracuda Backup - Great System and Service, but Stymied by Limited Storage
April 05, 2016
Barracuda Backup - Great System and Service, but Stymied by Limited Storage
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Barracuda Backup
We utilize Barracuda Backup for our mission-critical data - data we define as needing to be stored on an offsite in an area geographically distant from where our core business is located. For us, that means our patient data. We have two BBS appliances in service, one dedicated to or primary electronic medical record system and one dedicated to everything else critical. These are used and managed primarily by IT. We had a third appliance at one point covering a different electronic medical record system, but the facility that utilized that system was sold off and the EMR and backup went with the sale, so we ended up re-implementing the service for the buyer so they could continue on with it.
- Barracuda does the local/cloud backup integration very well - basically you pick the data you want to store and then click one button if you want to send it offsite. Their price/gb is very good as well, and if you're storing a lot of data, they have an all-you-can-eat cloud package so you don't have to worry about how much you're sending offsite.
- The appliances are very stable and almost set-it-and-forget-it. They're managed through a central console, so once the initial config of giving the appliance an IP is done, pretty much everything else is standardized through that one console.
- The interface is simple and adding data sources is a breeze. In the seven years we've used them, they have considerably expanded the service and its capabilities, and it can handle pretty much any system or OS we've thrown at it.
- You can't define backup systems to just go to the cloud, it has to be stored locally as well, which eats up the local storage.
- These appliances are high-priced for a small amount of storage and if you want to upgrade, you buy a new appliance. There's no replacing hard drives, you basically move up $5K for each 2Tb and replace the entire appliance each time. It's not a healthy model for growth.
- We've had a couple situations where we've had to pull data back down from the BBS cloud and while it can take a while sometimes, we haven't had an issue where we haven't been able to restore something that we needed. Overall it has been very reliable.
- We've had to implement two other backup systems in addition to Barracuda Backup and dedicate our BBSs to just mission-critical data because we're size-locked in our appliances. Upgrading to larger models is not financially viable at the moment and we can't expand their internal storage or point them to an iSCSI share or likewise. We brought in other systems to handle non-critical and virtual data because of those storage limitations.
- CrashPlan and Veeam Backup & Replication
Barracuda does very well for data that needs to be sent offsite. That's our main use for it. It's reliable and easy to configure, though it is storage-limited. What you buy in the appliance is what you get, period. We brought in CrashPlan to be able to utilize our own storage so that we could back up anything and everything, though we don't push offsite with CrashPlan. We brought in VEEAM to back up our virtual environment to our own storage again, because while the BBS was able to back up virtual machines, it didn't have the storage internally that we needed. VEEAM utilizes our own storage and we push across down to another of our own storage systems for remote backups, so we're going around the BBS appliance and only using it for data that we need to have stored somewhere geographically distant from our main datacenter.