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IRIS Plugin

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

This document describes the Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin, a dedicated extension to Bacula Enterprise designed to provide consistent and reliable backup and restore capabilities for systems using InterSystems IRIS.

InterSystems IRIS® Data Platform is a unified, high-performance data management and application development platform designed for modern enterprise workloads. It integrates database management, real-time analytics, interoperability, and application services into a single product, enabling organizations to build, deploy, and scale data-intensive solutions with predictable performance and reliability. IRIS supports traditional relational models alongside NoSQL and multi-model access (tables, objects, documents, key-value, multidimensional arrays) on the same data without replication or mapping overhead. This design enables high throughput for both transactional and analytical workloads concurrently.

InterSystems provides comprehensive and authoritative documentation on the product, including platform architecture, APIs, tools, and operational guidance for all supported versions of InterSystems IRIS. You can access this documentation at https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest.html

InterSystems IRIS has been adopted across a wide range of industries and environments where robust data management, integration, and performance are critical. Common use cases include:

Enterprise Data Fabrics: unify diverse data sources and support real-time processes and analytics without middleware layers.
High Throughput Data Ingestion: IoT, manufacturing, utilities, and financial services applications that require processing large volumes of real-time data.
Concurrent Transactions and Analytics: workloads requiring simultaneous OLTP and analytical query processing with predictable performance.
Edge and Distributed Deployments: lightweight deployment footprints for edge computing and fog architectures.
Interoperability and Integration: embedded integration frameworks, API management, and stream processing for connecting distributed systems and services.

InterSystems IRIS is also the database used in Epic Systems software, especially in the healthcare industry. While this document does not cover the details required for a full Epic deployment, related components can be protected by other modules of Bacula Enterprise using image-level or filesystem-level backups.

InterSystems IRIS supports deployment in on-premises environments, public clouds, hybrid configurations, and containerized infrastructures, enabling flexibility for operational and development teams.

Because IRIS is a complex database and application platform with in-memory structures, multi-model data storage, and mission-critical workloads, traditional file-system-only backups are insufficient to ensure data consistency and recovery objectives. The Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin addresses that gap by integrating with Bacula Enterprise to orchestrate and coordinate application-aware backups and restores for IRIS environments.

Why Bacula + IRIS

Bacula Enterprise complements IRIS with long-term retention, multi-target storage (disk, tape, object), and strict compliance controls without constraining deployment models among many other benefits. The IRIS Plugin provides application-aware backups and restores while Bacula supplies centralized policy management, cataloging, and offline or air-gapped protection for regulated environments.

The next sections provide architectural descriptions, best practices, and operational guidance for installation, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting.