HPE StoreOnce Reviews

The most valuable feature would be the high deduplication ratios, capable of 20 or more to 1 dedup ratio in a real-world backup environment. It seems to work very good for long retention times, even if there is little use, but sometimes you have to do it due to legal reasons, and that is where it shines.

In my previous organization, it removed the need for manual tape swapping. Hence, it removed the need for actual tape changers to be at 50 separate remote sites, leading to huge savings for the company.

Also, offsite tape storage is replaced by replication to a different/central site/device such as StoreOnce B6200/B6500 or even some lower-end one, such as 4900.

I would like to see them add the ability to turn on/turn off global deduplication and etc.

Currently, only VTL-level deduplication is supported properly, while there seems to be some part of global deduplication working. However, in some rare cases, I saw data being removed on untouched VTL while you were deleting some particular cartridge within a separate VTL. It has probably been fixed by the most recent StoreOnce OS upgrades.

I have been using it for 4+ years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

Some models are shipped with one power supply by default, even when redundant PSUs are supported in pairs; be aware of that.

As long as the architecture was done correctly, I did not encounter any scalability issues. If an entry-level StoreOnce device is placed on a “soon to grow“ site, that is a planning mistake, not a scalability issue.

Customer service is great.

Technical support is great.

We switched because of company policy, the tapes aged, etc.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I was within support team, which did implement as well as support the solution.

Huge. Simply eliminating the need for tape changers returned the cost of the hardware within less than half a year.

Get an expert who knows the products, so you can get the best prices possible for both DP and StoreOnce. Because there are some things that can work for the same solution in different ways, hence they are differently licensed as well as priced.

Make sure architecture is planning properly, e.g., centralised or decentralised HPE DP Cell Managers give you some quite different options and etc.

Excellent deduplication ratios.

It did not improve the way my organization functions: It was just an alternative method to accomplish what was being done a different way.

The UI is rather dated and not intuitive. Also, the setup is rather complex and you need to understand the product to best leverage it.

The GUI has a look from the traditional HP interfaces of 10 years ago. The layout is confusing as it is designed for someone that really understands the underpinnings of StoreOnce. The P6500 is basically a pair of DL380 servers running a Linux distribution clustered with all the necessary hardware and then is presented as a single StoreOnce appliance. Many of the menus in the GUI provide drill down capabilities that can get you deep into the inner workings of the appliance but, unless you know what you are doing, it is more there for support to utilize. While the appliance is a single cluster you are really working with each node individually further complicating management of the device. You need to put some thought into how you will distribute the workload across the nodes because the appliance does not provide any mechanisms for load balancing. While HPE claims StoreOnce will work with CommVault, our experience was that the use case was very narrow. While the P6500 has some beefy hardware the software is the Achilles heel. We found that as the dataset grows the P6500 becomes bogged down in housecleaning tasks that conflict with the incoming workload.

3 months.

The product did not scale well and had several issues where it bogged down under load. When used with a non HPE backup product, you really need to optimize the StoreOnce and your backup product to work well together.

Support was good, better than average, but left a little room for improvement.

We were using native backup (Commvault), which was unreliable. We selected this as a method to improve and better scale our backup deduplication, but it turned out StoreOnce introduced enough inconsistencies and incompatibilities, we actually went back to Commvault’s native deduplication.

You need vendor assistance to get the product properly set up and configured.

Vendors supplied resources for install and initial configuration assistance.

Make sure you understand your use case very well, go over it in detail with the vendor and get commitments that it is compatible with your use case.

Deduplication and replication are both extremely important for storing huge chunks of data.

Secondly, now it has extended support to VMware and MS SQL via EMC.

Well, it has improved the organization in the sense we can back up our data into StoreOnce directly from stores etc., so it's become cheaper for us.

I would like to see it support open stack and also other vendors’ hardware, if possible, via EMC.

I have an existing EMC backup solution and HPE StoreOnce solution.

Typically this happens in case of M&A between two companies when two different companies use two different storage vendors. Now I want to move my data from EMC to StoreOnce, but I don't have a direct way to move this data. I suggest that if it would offer OpenStack support then we will be able to freely move data across.

I have been using it for six months.

I have not really encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. We haven’t faced any major issues.

HPE technical support is a bit slower compared to EMC, which might have a larger support team that can respond faster.

Its deduplication feature and 3PAR support were the primary reasons we selected it.

I didn’t install it, and I was not there while it was getting installed. However, as far as I’ve heard, they didn't face any major issues.

Just look into the cost factor if you have some other system already in place. Like, say you already have EMC products, then it's probably better to stick with them.

The feature we were looking for was deduplication. Now, thanks to Catalyst containers, we have federated deduplication across all our remote sites.

We wanted something that would easily fit in our infrastructure. As we were familiar with HP products, it was very convenient for us to use tools we were used to such as iLO, Insight Manager, and so on.

Before we used HP StoreOnce, the backup was stored on DAS, which was fine until you have a problem in a disk and lose all your data.

So, we needed to consolidate this particular aspect of storage but we also wanted to store more data and increase the retention time.

The native replication feature allowed us to take it to the next level of consolidation with automated off-site replication. We now have site-level recovery as opposed to the disk-level recovery we had 3 years ago.

The product is doing just fine as it is now. An improvement would be an improved deduplication algorithm.

We've been using the solution for 3 years now. We added a StoreOnce 4700 unit last year so that we can replicate all the data in our datacenter.

It is something we were thinking about for a long time. The support of Catalyst container by Veeam Backup was the thing that was lacking until last year.

Due to the huge number of sites we have, we needed something easy to deploy. Configuring a new unit is a matter of minutes.

I was wondering at the time if we would have to deal with some hardware failure somewhere every other week and it turns out it's a solid solution, we encountered very few problem regarding hardware.

We have a 7/1 deduplication rate, which in our environment is pretty descent.

We're currently using StoreOnce 2620 & 2700 on our 175 remote sites which are replicated on a Storeonce 4700 in our datacenter. The thing that I was afraid of when we chose StoreVirtual was the huge number of sites and therefore the number of StoreOnce units.

When it comes to scalability, expansion shelves are available for all models and HP provides a VSA version of StoreOnce, which is free of charge up to 1TB, so it is satisfying for us.

Upgrade first, talk next. If you happen to be out of date regarding FW or patches, then you are the problem and not the unit. Basically, that's how it works at HP.

That being said, we have h+4 SLA on these units and the customer service never failed us so far.

Before we started using StoreOnce, every site had its own backup solution and its own storage for it, so we wanted to harmonize all of that. We were looking for a solution which would provide features like deduplication, native replication, ease of use and available on VSA as well.

It turns out StoreOnce was the only solution at the time. We had proposals reflecting different approaches, with different products bundled all together, or single products with a workaround for the one missing feature.

So we evaluated an Avamar grid, as well both physical and VSA. The deduplication rate was higher with Avamar and the replication worked out of the box, but if we wanted to stay in our budget range, we needed to go with a central Avamar grid and VSA on DAS on the remote site.

We went for StoreOnce because we didn't want our backup to rely on the remote site WAN connection and because the local VSA on DAS was not really an improvement.

It was straightforward. The very first unit was configured in 15 minutes and was ready to go.

We have a staff dedicated for that, so that was an in-house job. The StoreOnce unit runs on Linux. We have Linux admins, and it is frustrating for them to see that the product works out of the box and there's no need to log in using SSH.

Therefore, I recommend in-house implementation. It's easy, and the iLO UI is very user-friendly.

We don't have financial ROI. Our goal was to consolidate the infrastructure at all cost.

There's a VSA version free of charge up to 1TB, so just try it.

Catalyst functionality: for performance, it is better than VTL or NAS configs, and it provides total integration with HPE storage and backup solutions (3PAR, Data Protector, VM Explorer, and so on), and also integration with NetApp, Symantec (NBU/BE), and Veeam with the Catalyst plugin.

The special plugins developed with Oracle RMAN, MS-SQL for direct backup from these application systems to StoreOnce.

It reduces backup time and reduces storage space requirements, compared to non-deduplicated systems.

It reduces the amount of time it takes to recover data from storage compared to tapes.

It is easy to deploy and configure.

Deployment / config / install experience: 3 years.

Not especially.

Good.

Initial setup is simpler because all of the tasks can be done from GUI whereas before it was from the CLI.

HPE backup systems are very good products. Easy to manage, very good performance, with a lot of ongoing new development. Good integration with many backup or storage products.

Using virtual tapes, we can accelerate the backup/recovery of our solutions.

The CIFS share service performance is really poor; it is a nightmare. Instead of CIFS we prefer to use NFS.

When presenting CIFS shares to Linux hosts and I tried copying a huge quantity of files, performance was so slow, terribly slow... This was not an issue when I used NFS. Fortunately, I'm not the only one with this problem: http://www.v-strange.de/index.php/hardware/14-cifs-performance-problem-on-hp-storeonce-systems. Fortunately, too, it seems to be a firmware matter. I'll be looking to solve that problem.

I have been using it for 14 months.

I have not encountered any deployment or scalability issues. The product is really stable.

Technical support is great! No problem; fast solutions.

Initial setup was so easy, really easy.

We implemented it through a vendor; it was a smooth deployment.

To be honest, the product is expensive to acquire and costs have been growing since then.

It is at the top of its class, in my experience.

It's a great product but it is really expensive. Expanding its capacities is sometimes more expensive than buying new storage.

The Catalyst Store with Data Protector:

• It is possible to use Ethernet and Fabric at the same time with the same device.
• The configuration of Data Protector is easy.
• The media administration in Data Protector was simplified.
• The recovery of the cell manager in a disaster is more easy.
• It is possible to see the information of backup task in the StoreOnce device; before that, this information was only in the Data Protector database.

We implemented Catalyst with Data Protector in March 2016; after the change, the recovery process time of one or two days was reduced to 30 minutes in most of cases.

I think the integration with Data Protector and virtual environments is an area for improvement.

I have been using it for five months.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

I think that technical support is a weak point. I feel that technical support does not know the product. The call center is prepared to support a hardware error, but when we have any doubts regarding a new configuration, they have the same doubts. In this case, we need to contact some friends at HPE.

We previously used the same StoreOnce, but without Catalyst. Catalyst is the sum of NFS plus SAN disk in the same backup repository.

Configuration is very simple; the problem was changing the minds of the operators.

For a small configuration, it is expensive, but if you need to backup many servers with a lot of data, I think it is a good price.

I evaluated EMC before choosing this product.

Compression and replication are the features of this product that are the most valuable to me.

We moved from MSL and VSL, building a number of virtual libraries with different LTO formats and removing hundreds of physical tapes that we replaces with virtual replicated tapes.

I would like to see improvements regarding segmentation or the size limitations per library.

I have used this solution for 15 months.

Segmentation was one of the requirements. The HP team promised us that it is possible, but it wasn't available.

Technical support is excellent.

We previously used MSL and VSL, and we moved to this product because it supports virtualization (D2D).

Initial setup was very simple.

We implemented it in-house. I think the solution was easy to implement using HP Data Protector 8.01 at the beginning. The tricky part is the upgrades. I recommend upgrading the FW to latest the stable release before configuring.

The price is good.

If you are going to replicate, buy the two-way license.

I recommend this product.