HPE StoreOnce Reviews

Our customers use the solution for data backup scenarios.

The solution's most valuable feature is the ability to write multiple data backups simultaneously.

They should improve the solution's pricing. Also, the customer support service could be faster.

We have been using the solution for thirteen years.

The solution's stability is impressive; I rate it as a ten. We came across disk failure issues only once.

It is a very scalable solution for SMEs. It is possible to store additional data on the server using it. I rate its scalability as a ten out of ten.

I am satisfied with the solution's customer service, but they should respond faster. The last time we contacted them for some issue, they took around one week to resolve it.

The solution's initial setup is pretty straightforward. I rate the setup process as an eight. The time required for deployment depends on the workload. As far as the integration part is concerned, it takes a day to complete.

It requires two or three engineers to deploy the solution.

The solution's cost is above average. I rate its pricing as a seven. We purchase an annual subscription for its on-premises version. It is around 30% of the solution's cost. There are no additional costs apart from the standard license.

The customers can raise the solution's maintenance ticket for three years initially. It requires one executive to complete the process. Apart from it, they can raise tickets for technical support as well.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as a ten.

Some of the valuable features are that we’re able to regain ROI off of our tier one environment, so we’re able to take archive data, legacy data, put that on, give it retention tagging, and retention timelines, and then it’ll be able to be purged at a later date. Instead of using up our Tier 1 storage, which is about a $1.45 a gigabyte, we’re able to leverage tier two storage with dedupe and compression, at 35 - 45 cents a gigabyte, so that to us just made sense.

In terms of benefits that we’re seeing, we’re definitely seeing improved backup times. We went from two and a half hours to four hours for backups -- down to under ten minutes. So, the amount of recouped administration time that we’re gaining is astronomical. From a stability perspective I think StoreOnce has definitely been extremely stable for us.

We didn’t really have a D-R-D-P solution and I think it really compliments our blade environment in taking a lot of the data that we have around the organization that’s legacy, and looking at that, looking at last touched date, things of that nature, we’re able to really leverage archiving now, and that’s something we weren’t able to do before, because we were keeping all of our backups in our Tier 1 storage. We really didn’t have a location to have an enterprise data recovery, and data protection strategy and now we do.

In terms of the way that we feel, or the way that I feel about StoreOnce, I think it definitely provided us with the opportunity to give the business something it never had before, and that is a true guarantee to the data that we have. So we’re able to really protect and fortify our archive data, instead of not being able to restore in times when we actually need to have the data available.

From a feature functionality perspective I think overall having some more mobility tied into it, having the ability to have applications that you can use on the go, that can give you kind of an overlay of the overall health and welfare of your data protection and data recovery strategy, being able to do simple things, like having run books. I think those are some of the things that we definitely want to get into. I’d like to see that develop a lot more.

From a scalability perspective, some of the things that are intriguing to me are we have the ability to scale as the business needs and we can also contract, so we can be fluid. We can move when the business needs us to move, we can back up, we can make sure that we have all the pertinent data that the organization needs, and also have the ability to restore it quickly, and not tie up production systems and production storage while doing that.

I think HP, by far has some of the best technical support I’ve ever encountered. I was just telling a story in regards to how we started doing business with HP. HP came out and serviced us, and we weren’t even under contract. The same day, same night, and made sure our organization was whole come the next day, and for an eight billion dollar company that really resonated with us. That was the precursor to our decision to move forward with HP and we’ve been really happy ever since.

In looking at criteria from a tier two storage perspective in terms of data protection and data recovery, I think cost was definitely one of the factors that we looked at. We looked at response time, we looked at integration ability, and I think coupling that with the environment that we had, we’re a 98 percent virtualized organization, from a virtual server perspective, and I think tying that in to our already HP environment, really weighed on the decision for us to move in the StoreOnce direction.

From a solutions perspective, in terms of what we’re doing from data protection and data recovery, we knew that we needed to have a tier two solution in terms of storage. We looked at many different avenues within the market, and we really felt that from an ROI perspective and a total cost of ownership perspective, that HP StoreOnce was really the way we needed to go, so we built our data protection and data recovery strategy around that using HP and Veeam. That actually helped us to build RTOs, RPOs, and real SLAs and OLAs from a restoration perspective to the business.

There were other vendors on the short list, and to be completely honest, they paled in comparison. We were actually considering an EMC product, DataDomain, and Exagrid and they just didn’t have the compute power or the price point that we really wanted to be in, so we just leveraged the HP relationship that we already had and went complete StoreOnce, and we’ve been extremely happy with it so far.

Researching advice I’d give to my peers: I would definitely say do your homework. Do a true comparison between everybody in the market. That way you will actually be able to see the benefit that HP provides at the cost point, at the total cost of ownership, ROI, and also from a performance perspective as well. Depending on who you’re using from a backup solution perspective, StoreOnce, is gonna work with anyone.

Getting a full understanding of who the players are in the market, you’re gonna see that HP is definitely a major player in that space. Really understand your business, really understand what your strategic goals are, really understand where you’re going from an organizational perspective. That will give you insight into how you build your data protection and data recovery strategy. Some of the things that we did were we sat down with operations, we sat down with legal, we sat down with finance, and we defined what that was as an organization before we ever started looking, so definitely do your homework. Make sure you understand where your business is going before you go get a solution

In researching solutions I think peer reviews are definitely important. I think knowing for yourself is also important, but definitely do your research, definitely listen to what the market is saying, and above all else, go see it for yourself. Take a demo, look at it, look at what they’re saying, help them prove it to you, really understand what your requirements are and how the solution maps back to your requirements. It’s really all about that. If it’s a map, and it maps back, you got to be able to prove what in the solution maps back to what your requirement is.

Leveraging data from your peers is definitely important, but making sure that you truly understand what your requirements are, and what in the solution maps back to your requirements is key for success.

The deduplication feature is awesome. The storage space has been cut down by at least 50% and on some instance greater reduction has been achieved. Here is a current example showing the space savings: Actual User Data Store 44.9TB, Actual Size on Disk 4.0TB with an 11.3 dedupe ratio. This was only one of my libraries on the StoreOnce 4430 device.

Please refer to the answer above about valuable features. The space saving on storage of actual user data also has a cost savings attached to it. We do not have to extend the actual storage space as quickly now due to the space savings of the deduplication feature.

The auto load balancing between VTL Libraries has been not as efficient as it should have been. I have manually load balanced between my libraries to maintain a tight control.There have also been bug fixes in the past for their auto load balancing feature. I would like to see this greatly improved so that I feel that it is trustworthy enough to utilize this feature.

I've used it for one and half years in an enterprise environment with HP DataProtector v7.0

No issues during deployment of the 4430 device into the enterprise environment.

Not with this current model 4430, but with a previous model we did have stability issues and these have been resolve with the 4430 model.

No issues with scalability. We purchased an additional 20TB shelf with the 4430 device (which came with a 20TB shelf included in the package we purchased).

HP’s customer service is outstanding. Turnaround time on parts for us is four hours and we also have them in less time than that. The HP service representatives are knowledgeable, friendly and are very easy to speak to. They are people who don't read from a script, but actually have a working knowledge of the equipment.

It's outstanding.

No, and we chose StoreOnce as we are currently an HP enterprise environment.

In most ways it was straightforward, however, you need to be an experienced network administrator to install this device.

It was done as an in-house implementation. However, we currently work with an HP partner in all our enterprise purchases. They're called High Performance Technologies, Inc. in Palm City, Florida, and the IT team at this business are outstanding and they all keep up to date with their HP certifications. They work with HP to obtain the best pricing for the equipment we need to ascertain. With this business relationship, comes years of trust and we know that they understand our enterprise network topology and make recommendations based off that long term knowledge.

The cost savings of not having to continually purchase additional shelf space has been the driving force of staying with this outstanding product.

The original cost was approximately $250,000. Included in that was the device itself and 40TB of storage space.

We did evaluate other options but due to the fact that HP has set the standard, we stayed with them.

I've had little to no issues with either the StoreOnce 4430 device or the DataProtector software. I would highly recommend this type of backup system for enterprise environments.

Read the documentation provided by HP on their website and research the web to avoid any possible issues during implementation.

I use HPE StoreOnce in my company as a backup tool for our personal data.

My company works with HPE and Dell. Recently, we moved from Dell to HPE. In our company, we used Dell to make use of the performance of Dell Data Domain Boost, after which we moved to HPE StoreOnce.

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration.

The user interface of HPE StoreOnce is an area of concern where improvements are required. The UI of HPE StoreOnce provides users with a lot of information, but its users find it difficult to use. Instead of the user interface providing users with a lot of information, it should be made easier for users.

I would like HPE StoreOnce the ability to do more compression, but it may change the compression and deduplication, which is not good.

I have been using HPE StoreOnce for four or five years. I use HPE StoreOnce Version 3.4.0.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

In terms of ROI, I would say that I was not satisfied with the product's performance since we faced a few problems with it in our company. I feel it doesn't work well, and it takes time when the recovery aspect is involved.

The product is not expensive. It is available at a good price.

The capabilities of HPE StoreOnce are not good, especially when compared to its competitors like Dell Data Domain Boost and SolarWinds.

HPE StoreOnce is an easy-to-use tool.

People should use HPE StoreOnce as a secondary backup tool.

I rate the overall tool a four out of ten.

The most valuable features for us are the ease of use, the reliability, and the exceptional deduplication that we get across that data that we store on those devices.

We use it primarily for storage of backup data. We need to keep large numbers of historical backups and they typically repeat. It's a lot of data that is the same, but has to be kept for the purposes of historical reasons. You have to go back to points in time and storing the data on standard disks is wasteful and inefficient.

We needed a deduplication of parts. We've tried a number of different options and we settled on StoreOnce's being the most efficient and the fastest technology that met the price point that we were looking for.

In the service provider business, we are competing with a large number of other organizations and a lot of the time price is what matters to customers. We need to be competitive. We need to be able to provide a service at a price point that meets market expectation and this is a particular consideration in what we were looking for. The deduplication storage appliances and StoreOnce in particular does that by allowing us to provide lower price cloud storage for customer data

We would like to see some improvements in the Veeam Backup & Replication integration. It's good, but it has a lot of room to improve. In particular around the inability to easily move data between StoreOnce appliances. Also, there are some limitations around how it can be implemented for Cloud Connect repository storage. We currently have to use SMB Shares rather than proper Catalyst integration.  It's an interesting scenario, because Veeam tell us that it's the way HPE's StoreOnce Catalyst integration works and of course, HPE are saying that it's Veeam who have to work with us on this. We are hoping that they will get together and come up with a good solution and vision, too.

We have been using HPE StoreOnce appliances for just over two years now.

We've had failed disks but we've not lost any data and HPE's support has been very good. We did have some difficulty with the phone home functionality originally. Oddly enough, in one case, a firmware update fixed that for one of the devices. Overall, we found them to be very reliable.

I think it's interesting. The first one we did, we paid for HPE to install it, so they went through the whole setup process and everything else. I suspect that's probably why they normally get you to pay for it, because we did it ourselves from the second one and it was fine. It's not simple. It's not the click and point; it's command line. It's more technical; it's not a simple process, not like their wizards that you get with most of their products.

To be honest, we were quite happy with the price, but we always want things cheaper than they are. I think for what we got, we felt that the price was quite reasonable comparing it to other products that provide that same level of functionality; it was priced quite well in the market. We are looking for larger StoreOnce deployments for other requirements at the moment. Again, we are finding the price point quite attractive.

From that point of view, no problem at all. I'm just trying to think from a licensing point of view, they do seem to like charging for every little component. If you want to put a 10Gb adapter in there, there is a license charge for that. If you want to put in a fiber channel adapter, there is a license charge for that. On the whole, it hasn't been a limiting factor for us at all.

We looked at EMC Data Domain. We looked at Microsoft Storage Server on a number of different appliances, including an HPE option there. We found with Windows Storage Server, the performance wasn't there. It just didn't meet our requirements. We use Veeam backup and replication, and the integration that StoreOnce provides works really well. We have a very strong relationship with HPE and in the end they kind of swayed us.

I wouldn't want to say it's perfect because there is room to improve, but for what we are using it for, we are finding it does the job really well.

From a data point of view, you've got to be confident that the data you're storing is going to be deduplicable. Otherwise, you're not going to get any savings. If you're storing prededuplicated data, highly compressed data, data that doesn't repeat, you just wasted money on expensive disks, because you're paying a premium for the benefit of the data to be deduplicated.

You obviously want to be sure that the data that you're putting there is going to compress very well. We knew that was the case, so it was a no-brainer for us. I think we got a bit more deduplication than we were expecting, which is always wonderful. It doesn't always happen that way.

It's cost effective, technologically advanced, and very scalable. It integrates with the rest of the HPE infrastructure, like 3PAR, for example.

From a business point of view, it enables us to pay closer attention to our caps and our competitive cost level.

Because it integrates with other HPE systems, it is easier for us to manage compared to the system we had before.

I would mostly want to see some technical improvements in some very specific areas. For example, a feature that is missing, compared to the competition, is the ability to globally duplicate all systems.

EMC Data Domain can deduplicate globally among all volumes, whereas HPE StoreOnce's deduplication is per single volume. Thus, it is a little less efficient, if you have several volumes.

So far, it looks quite stable.

Scalability is very good.

We get technical support from our partner and also from HPE personnel. The support is very good.

The previous system reached its end of life and it was becoming obsolete. It was no longer performing enough for the company. Business is flowing, fortunately; so we needed a faster and more scalable solution. The switch to HPE StoreOnce was a planned investment.

I would say the initial setup was straightforward, but I was not involved from an operational perspective. I am involved in that I am responsible for the teams; so I was involved in setting the objectives and I was informed of the key facts. I’m not the one who strokes the keyboard.

We actually work with HPE a lot, but also with Dell EMC. For now, we balance the distribution 50/50. There's some good in both vendors.

My advice to colleagues is to deeply explore the features of StoreOnce because they have improved in the last year. StoreOnce is not the market leader. The market leader now is without any doubt EMC Data Domain. Try not to just look at the market numbers, but also at the technology of the product. Give StoreOnce a try. Try the product before deciding to buy it.

The most important criteria when we choose a vendor is the technology. We are very technically oriented, so first we compare products in terms of technological level. By technology, I mean features, performance, and integration with other vendor solutions.

We put cost effectiveness a little lower in our evaluation. Price is obvious, but it is not the main thing for us.

The partnership with the vendor is very important. The partner must have strong competence in what they are selling to us. It is obviously very important to have a skilled and certified partner that helps you implement the product. This restricts the circle of possible vendors and partners to very few.

We are a financial organization and HPE StoreOnce backs up our data on a daily basis. Our entire infrastructure is running on HPE's main server and this backup solution was implemented as part of it.

In the financial industry, we have to retain backups for certain types of information for different periods of time. Some data is retained for three months, whereas other types of data are retained for five years.

The size of the backup data is very small, which is one of the features that we really like. Our data center grows between 20% and 30% each year and it is currently at 70 terabytes in size. We are now running a 40 terabyte backup, which is between 80% and 90% capacity. This size of the backup is really attractive.

The deduplication feature works well.

We did not find the accompanying software, Data Protector, very useful. Instead, we purchased a separate backup utility called Arcserve Backup.

One of the drawbacks of this product is that you cannot add another disk array when you reach capacity. Scaling is very costly because you have to buy a new box.

In the future, I would like to see built-in, hardware-level protection against ransomware attacks.

We have been working with HPE StoreOnce for between six and seven years.

We have not encountered any issues with it and I would say that it is quite stable. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

We have just reached capacity and we are now trying to get a new box.

The support is quite good. If we have any issues then they will connect remotely to assist us. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The licensing fees are based on how much storage space is required.

This is a good product and I recommend it. However, I think that it is important to consider which backup software to use. If it does not support the capacity that the StoreOnce has then you will run into a problem.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's a leading-edge technology with the capabilities it brings. We need to buy less of it, which means it's more economical. We also really benefit from the GUI capabilities.

We're also able to create service stacks that are beneficial across other HP products.

It makes it a lot more cost-effective because you're not buying ten pieces of technology separately. We bought it as a stack, racked it together, and it brought efficiency in terms of management, which means we've needed less resources.

While the setup was simple because of HP's involvement, it's been complex to run because of a third-party. They put it in a shiny new case and started changing some things. If they'd have left it alone, it would have been fine.

Our partner brought the technology to us, bought it on our behalf, and are running it on our behalf. They told us that they have a lot of knowledge and that they know how to run it, but in reality they don't and have not followed best practices. So now, they're kind of moved out. We're getting our hands around it ourselves, and it's behaving a lot better.

We're outsourced with a partner who recalls a larger amount of problems with the product.

We're able to scale it out to other centers.

I've used my HP account team, if that counts as technical support. They've been fantastic.

For me it was very much a legacy decision. People who were originally involved are no longer with us.

It was fairly simple to set up because we had HP involved.

Our partner implemented it for us, and the results have not been good.

The price puts me off. It's definitely on the high side.

Don't be fooled by other organizations' marketing. Do your homework and make sure it suits your needs.