Tech news in 3 minutes

Bull and Foxconn Advance European AI Infrastructure with Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 Platform Built in Europe

26 d ago

Bacula Systems, a provider of high-security backup and recovery solutions, has expanded its HPC data protection portfolio with the launch of BsnapDiff technology for ZFS and GPFS environments, alongside its Lustre Changelog integration. These additions build on earlier HPC-focused investments such as HPCAccelerator and native file system integrations. The technology addresses a persistent challenge: efficiently backing up environments with hundreds of millions or billions of files. Traditional incremental backups require a full scan of the file system, causing performance bottlenecks, increased metadata activity, and extended backup windows. Bacula’s BsnapDiff leverages native file system capabilities—metadata, snapshots, APIs, or changelogs—to identify changed files directly, reducing or eliminating full directory tree scans. Key benefits include dramatically faster incremental backups, reduced impact on primary storage, improved metadata efficiency, shorter backup windows, and improved user and application performance. As file counts grow, the efficiency gains become significant. For example, Bacula’s BsnapDiff for ZFS uses `zfs diff` to detect changes between snapshots, cutting processing from hours to under a minute in environments with hundreds of millions of files. For GPFS, it uses IBM Storage Scale (GPFS) snapshot and backup APIs to identify changed inodes without directory traversal. For Lustre, where snapshots are often impractical, the Lustre Changelog Plugin tracks changelog events to maintain an optimized record of changes for efficient incremental backups. The BsnapDiff technologies are part of Bacula’s broader strategy to provide deep interoperability with storage platforms common in HPC, AI, research, and large-scale enterprise environments. Combined with HPCAccelerator, parallel processing, and broad storage interoperability, these enhancements help architects design next-generation backup and archival infrastructures that scale with rapidly expanding data volumes in AI, scientific research, and exascale computing.