HPE StoreOnce Reviews

Agnostic backups.

Quick recovery.

StoreOnce software is sometimes unstable.

10 years.

Sometimes unstable.

No.

At times not good, other times good.

Complex.

Do a detailed inside PoC.

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 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.

I think the most valuable feature is the catalyst technology, which is in the StoreOnce appliance. It allows us to really hit our backup targets. It also allows us to make the most of the appliance and make the most of the technology as a whole.

It's really given us more confidence in our backup procedures and our DR. It's also really just been beneficial because it's kind of replaced a lot of older equipment and consolidated our back-up plan into one device and made things a lot more streamlined, runs a lot faster.

It's easier to manage because we were running a VTL device, a Virtual Tape Library, and it became a headache to manage tons of virtual tapes, whereas the StoreOnce is a one place one stop shop for back-up for stores, so that's really help me train other people on how to use the system and not have to go here, there, and yonder to figure out what you really need.

The biggest thing I think can be improved upon would be direct tape from the StoreOnce device so that we could actually ... We archive our backups on tape, so I feel like if we could somehow plug our tape drive directly into the StoreOnce device and set it up to where it would archive based on, if some kind of rules based engine or what have you, that would really be an improvement for us.

So far, we've been really impressed with it. We've had no downtime. We're coming off a D2D4312 system, and we had greater than 99.9 percent uptime on that device. We're very confident in the StoreOnce device, the uptime stability, everything is going to be just as good. We're a long-term HP customer, and we will probably remain so because it just works.

Scalability, we bought the device with one external expansion option, and I think it'll scale up to four. For the next five to seven years, it should scale out for all of our needs. It's very good, we're a mid-size enterprise, so it will more to meet our needs unless something disruptive happens.

It's very good, the questions I had were answered probably within, I think, maybe two to four hours, so it was a really good experience for that.

Due to a lot of retention, we've been having to retain a lot of things for compliance. We were running out of space on our older system, and we've been looking at the catalyst technology as an upgrade to the older system, but it was determined that we should just buy a new system and migrate forward because the old system was 5 or 6 years old, I think.

It was prior to HP bringing the catalyst technology, it came out on the 6,000 units down to the 4,000 level. It never had catalyst, it was a straight VTL backup to disk solution.

It was a pretty easy process. We basically stacked it racked it, plugged it in, went through the start-up guide. We did have some help from Avnet, they were kind of our partner, but we actually did it all in house, and they were kind of our Tech Support.

I looked a few EMC solutions and a couple other vendors, but basically the price point and feature set was not there for any other vendor. HP has earned a reputation in our organization for reliability and stability, and they get first pick on things due to that reputation because it just works. I actually have one server sitting in a closet from 1997 that's still running, so that's kind of a testament to how much we believe in HP.

Really to talk to a reseller. Our reseller that helped us out a lot was CDW, and we really talked to a reseller. If at all possible, to make that extra investment in the catalyst technology because it's really going to make their lives a whole lot simpler, whole lot easier, and I think that's the number 1 thing is look at the HP offerings, look at the catalyst offerings, and it's really going to simplify your life. Backups are kind of one of those things where you don't want to worry about it, you don't want to be up at night fiddling with it. I've probably gone from spending anywhere from maybe four to six hours a week tending backups to about 30 minutes a week. Just in my time, and our backup window has been cut by 75%, it's probably taken about 25% h time as before we implemented the catalyst technology.

The valuable feature is the ability to work with the Veeam software to reduce the backup windows.

The benefits are more capacity in the backup server and the ability to retain backups.

I would like to see better integration with Veeam software.

It demonstrates high stability and it can integrative with Veeam and other HPE products such as 3PAR.

The scalability is very high and you can get more space if you need to grow.

I have not used technical support.

We knew we needed to invest in this solution because we needed to fine-tune our backup windows.

We are not evaluating other companies.

When selecting a vendor, we look for reliability in the market, the capacity for growth, and how the company integrates their products.

I recommend this product because of the easy integration with Veeam and other backup products.

I would say the reliability, the ease of use, and the simple upgrades are the most valuable features. We did quite a bit of capacity upgrades in the past because it wasn't our primary storage platform for backups in the beginning. So we kind of sized it small, and then we went through several upgrade paths to get to where we are today. And all the upgrades were really simple; no issues.

It allowed us to stop using physical tapes, so we saved money on the tape storage. It allows us to have better DR capabilities because everything we back up with StoreOnce, gets replicated up to our DR site.

We had some growing pains, which was due to our internal issues. We were rushed to get it installed, and didn't necessarily do all the proper training on it. Even though we had HPE resources onsite, again we were just trying to get it up and going quickly. I think in the future, if we switch platforms, we would probably address the training better than we did this time. But the product performed well out of the box with very few support calls probably.

The stability's been great. We haven't had any issues with it. We had a few growing pains in the beginning, but a lot of it was just getting used to the platform. We haven't had any data loss with it. It stayed up. Even through all the upgrades, we haven't had issues.

We started small and it's grown exponentially since then. I'm not sure how much bigger we're going to get, but it is scaled greatly and performance hasn't decreased.

Technical support are knowledgeable. Fortunately, we have a pretty much dedicated support person that we deal with. By HPE giving us just one resource, it's helped us because they are familiar with our environment. They're familiar with our systems. Support's been painless.

We were running legacy virtual tape libraries through HPE and stuff a ton, and we needed the ability to replace those older systems. The latest and greatest technology at the time was StoreOnce, so we did an evaluation with it, set it up in our lab. Again, it was super easy to use. It did everything as promised. It was sized appropriately for what we needed at the time. And the price was competitive.

Initial setup was straightforward. I mean we pretty much rolled it into the data center, cabled it up, and we were backing up data the first day with it.

Nothing's perfect, but the speed we get from the system, the deduplication we get from the system, the replication, it all works as designed. We haven't really had any complaints with the product. Again, nothing's perfect, so we can't give it a perfect rating, but it's very good, and it is way better than what we used before.

We don't have to deal with physical tapes anymore. We don't have to deal with all those headaches because they are fragile. And support costs are tremendous for physical tapes when we were storing tens of thousands of them off-site. It let us saves costs on that. We run a pretty thin shop, so our two existing backup people were able to step in and start using the system, no issues. It's just been great so far.

I'd say don't be afraid of going tapeless. Have some faith in the HPE sales team when they tell you, because they will come in with deduplication estimates of how much space you'll save with the product. Our experiences was pretty accurate. You may be shocked at how they size the platform, but we didn't have any big issues with that.

The features my clients appreciate more is the deduplication ratios. It's amazing. That technology can put tons of TBs in a fewer space.

The benefits are clear. They need to store their backups in a single space with this feature of deduplication, compression. The administration is so easy for them and the integration with their backup application they are using, like Data Protector, are so transparent.

The licence procedures: There is a team for the deployment and there's a team for the licence, but they don't communicate with each other. That's an issue for us.

My customers don't have any issues, important issues, with StoreOnce.

It's not necessary to scale the smaller equipment, and we haven't had to scale the larger equipment as our customers aren't there yet.

HPE have better support - hardware and software - compared to the competition. They appreciate it so much. Their response time is so good.

Complex for a technician is not an issue because it's very clear. Putting the StoreOnce in production is transparent for a technician who has a sense of knowledge and basically operating systems knowledge too.

We start up the equipment and we need to put the licence number and the serial number of the equipment but I had a problem with that. It is not clear which serial number we need to use. I had a problem with a client who used one serial number but that serial number wasn't the correct one. We needed to open a case for re-licensing the equipment. It takes about two weeks to put in the licence. It's not OK for us, for the client. It's the only issue I have with the StoreOnce.

The good feature about StoreOnce is, its speed. It's integration with 3PAR, so you can do express backups. You can take your snapshots from your 3PAR and you can back it up directly to your StoreOnce. The other nice feature about that is, you can then take your data, and if you wanted to, you can replicate it to another StoreOnce. Even from there, you can have that ... Then you can also offload it Tape. With 3PAR and with StoreOnce, we kind of have an end to end solution for the customer. The other nice thing about StoreOnce is, it supports VTL. You can do a VTL type configuration on your StoreOnce, you can do Catalyst stores, and then you can also do NAS stores.

This is just a personal thing for me as it comes down to documentation and giving clear information. If you want to do express backup from 3PAR to StoreOnce, you need the RMC license, you need Virtual Copy on 3PAR, and then you need the Catalyst license. I've been to a bunch of tech talks, and they never really say this specifically. It's in the quick specs, but I remember my boss asking "What are you adding that license for," and I said, "It's required. Here's the documentation, but I don't think the message is clear enough." You know what I mean? I understand people need to understand the technology, but when it comes down to it, if you're creating a parts list, a build that's supposed to go into a customer's site and work, if you don't know all the parts and pieces, then you've got a failed implementation. That's just my personal view.

It doesn't replace traditional backup, but if you want a solution that can back up your snapshots quickly and reliably, then StoreOnce is good.