Barracuda Backup Server 390 review

For total data protection, businesses must consider on-site, off-site and cloud backup strategies, but the more complex these become the more difficult they are to manage. Barracuda’s Backup Server appliances are designed to deal with the whole process, including site-to-site replication and cloud backup, from a single web portal.

There are no hidden costs, since the price includes support for Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac, NetWare, Exchange and SQL Server apps, plus VMware and Hyper-V. You start with a local appliance, of which Barracuda offers a wide range with a choice of capacities.

We tested the Backup Server 390, which has a mirrored pair of 1TB SATA drives and a backup capacity of 500GB. This may not seem much, but the appliance performs variable block-level deduplication, which can increase available capacity significantly.

Deployment was easy. We connected the appliance to the lab network and used the local console to give it a static IP address. We linked it to our account on Barracuda’s Cloud Control portal by entering its serial number and the unique code from the box.

Along with the cloud services, we tested site-to-site replication using a Backup Server 490. After linking this to our account, all we had to do was declare it to our 390 as a replication target.

We found the portal easy to use, and started testing by declaring our Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V, Server 2012, Exchange 2007, Windows 7 and 8 plus VMware ESX Server 5 systems as sources. Windows systems require a small agent to be installed first, but nothing needed to be loaded on our VMware server.

We could then simply tick a box to have everything backed up. The agents let you browse file systems and applications on each Windows system, so we could create jobs for backing up drives, folders, files, Hyper-V VMs, the Exchange data store and messages.