HPE StoreOnce Reviews

We are a partner and reseller for HP products, and we integrate various solutions for our customers. One of the areas that I work with is implementing storage solutions, and this is one of the products that my customers use.

This solution is used to emulate data relief for an MSL4048 and is deployed on-premises.

The solution would be improved if it could also be used as a data store for VMware. Not only as a backup repository but as an archiving data store for VMware.

We have implemented this solution for a number of customers, and they are happy with the stability.

There are several models of this device, and we have supplied our customers based on their requirements. Up to this point, they are still using the same models and we have not had to assist anyone with scaling this solution.

As far as HPE support is concerned, I don't have any issues with them. For the most part, I am coordinating with them. We normally handle the support for our customers or contact HPE support on their behalf.

The initial setup of this solution is quite easy for me. The implementation is straightforward.

The setup and configuration will only take about half a day, but the testing will take a little more time. You have to monitor the performance of the disk and the emulated data. In total, it will take perhaps two days to complete everything, including a backup and restore.

For anybody looking for a robust backup solution that emulates a tape library, this is the product that they should go for. The only thing is that they cannot remove the data because it is appliance-based. They cannot, for example, manually remove the tape and bring it to another location. They would need to use replication for this.

This product is not perfect, but I am quite satisfied with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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 most valuable features for us are the very high-performance deduplication and high deduplication rates. These features make it quite cost-effective.

We previously used a tape-based backup system with a tape library and off-site storage of tapes, which was very expensive to run. It also wasn't terribly reliable and we had constant issues with capacity. 

We migrated to StoreOnce and we're using the copy feature of StoreOnce to copy to another unit in a different location. We have the primary unit that we do backups to, and then we have another unit in our disaster-recovery site, and all the backups are copied over the WAN to the disaster-recovery site. It uses deduplication to do that too, so the bandwidth requirements are quite low. 

So we have a completely tapeless backup flow that is very low impact on our network and has very high reliability.

StoreOnce actually does pretty much everything we need. There are  quite a lot of features that we don't use at the moment such as virtual tape library and NAS. 

But the initial network setup is not intuitive, and this could be improved.

I've used it for 18 months.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

StoreOnce has been 100% stable in the eighteen months that we've been using it. We actually purchased an additional unit for a third location after the initial purchase of two units on the basis of the performance and reliability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

StoreOnce is not really complicated to set up. It's probably something that can be done by a typically-skilled systems administrator in a day or a half-day.

I think as long as you have a clear understanding of what it does and you're quite sure that that's what you need, then there isn't a better product. Certainly, in terms of the ease-of-use and reliability, we haven't had any issues with StoreOnce. It's definitely one of the products that I would recommend to anyone.

Its catalyst store and deduplication are valuable as it saves disc space. I'm not sure what the ratio is, to be fair, but it's significant. It's something silly like 240 terabytes if they were all expanded and it's occupying something like 20 terabytes, or something like that.

We haven't had the need to use reporting, but we've still got capacity and don't need to dive in. At some point we'll start reaching capacity, and we'll need to start drilling down a bit more into what it's doing.

We brought it in to transfer all of the services that were old and creaky onto a single platform. So we back up all of our VMs and all of our SQL boxes to it.

If it could do scheduling, then perhaps I wouldn't need to have Data Protector as a backup product. Data Protector is a software layer that schedules every night into the VMware layer and says, "Back these VMs up to the StoreOnce device." And it goes through the Catalyst stores and does all the kind of stuff that StoreOnce does. If StoreOnce could initiate the backup itself by a scheduling mechanism, then potentially we wouldn't need to have Data Protector do it, which would take something out of the chain for me. There's no problem with Data Protector, it's just something else. If I can keep it down to hardware and not have to go through a software layer, I think I'd get better performance.

We brought it in a part of a whole HP infrastructure about 18 months ago.

We've had no issues deploying it.

We've never had an issue with stability.

We've got four trays of discs, and I think we can add another X number of trays, so it's not going to be endlessly scalable, but it's going to be scalable up to X.

We had blades, 3PAR, and some fabric switches. We looked at a way to consolidate all of our backups. So, we had technology like Tivoli and CSN, and we had other little bits of backup, and we thought we'd go for a single product. As a part of the transformation, we brought in Data Protector, and that basically backs itself off to the StoreOnce.

We consider HP, and the pricing we get is good and reflects that. If it was an open marketplace, we'd look at anything and everything because we'd evaluate the marketplace for cheap D-to-D devices.

We use it to present virtual tape live-link to our NetApp so that we can backup our NetApp for NDMP to our StoreOnce. So virtual tapes are the concepts of a physical set of tapes. Imagine you've virtualized it, and you have to give it a size on disc, which because it's a virtual tape, it doesn't have to have the same constraints as a physical tape of four terabytes. A virtual tape can be X terabytes. We originally put them in and sized them too small. And when I had to go back, and we had something like 400 tapes. I had to edit each tape and increase its capacity so that we got better value out if it. I wish I could have just Shift-Select-Edit and changed it, which I couldn't do. So some level of automating that task cause you can imagine, going through 400 tapes is a lot of work. It can happen, and we didn't know at the time, and lesson learned. If we put another StoreOnce in with more BTLs, we'd know perfectly to set that size to be higher from the start. So, the advice would be if you're using BTLs, set them to your preferred maximum because you might not be able to batch.

The dedupe benefit, the granularity of specifying different retention and different policies for dedupe, you can go without dedupe, too. Sometimes you have applications that are doing compression and don't need the dedupe benefit. You have all that versatility in this scalable product, for sure.

I'm a storage supervisor in the media and entertainment industry. We use the StoreOnce and the 3PAR, as well. Our previous solution was tape only solution. We looked at the StoreOnce as a valuable stepping stone to get a lot of our backups done without the use of tape, so it was sort of an intermediary device to accomplish that goal. We're partnered with HP. We came alongside HP and they offered this solution as a viable alternative.

The stability has been rock solid. We have not had issues. There have been other platforms we've seen problems with. Other than sheer capacity in terms of size, the throughput has been adequate, so we haven't had really any issues to speak of. It's a scalable solution that gives us a lot of versatility. We're able to put these devices in remote locations if we need them, to help offload the tape infrastructure, and really meet the requirements of the site, whether it be the retention or the off-siting capability. Then, as those sites grow, we can expand them. It does give us a lot of versatility. The upgrade process, my understanding is, I haven't been directly involved, but it has been hitless. There really has not been downtime to do these.

The technical support is fantastic. Yeah, we've had a great experience with the StoreOnce device. We've even gotten folks on site when we've needed them to do firmware upgrades and those sorts of things where our technical abilities don't quite cut the mustard, so to speak. You know, we're pretty satisfied with where things are at right now. I can't speak to what we truly need in the coming weeks, months, years, from the StoreOnce platform, but I think what I've seen here so far, some of the solutions being offered as far as integration with the 3PAR would be an area that would be really interesting to see.

On the short list was to continue with IBM. We were in a TSM environment, and we had been with TSM for years and years. The HP Data Protector solution with the StoreOnce on the backend seemed like a logical next step for us, because we have other HP products in-house, including the 3PAR, for some of our tier one storage needs. I would give it at least an eight or a nine. Yeah, it's a rock solid platform for us. It's got a very direct application, and purpose. It's not trying to meet many, many needs like some of the file services platforms do. It's a backup and it does its job.

I think it was mostly a price win, really, between the two. The pricing that was offered in conjunction with a lot of other purchases we've made with HP made it a very attractive offer, and the technology behind it was solid and passed all of our testing needs. It just seemed like a logical fit for us. Sure, with StoreOnce we were actually seeing quite a bit of dedupe benefit where we weren't getting any dedupe before, so we're actually getting reports generated where we can see the dedupe ratios for various datasets that we're actually backing up. Basically the net effect is that we're using a lot less space to do our backups, and it gives us the versatility to spin off certain backups to tape, or to replicate off-site or to just let age out in the system and get overwritten.

Daily onsite backup, rapid data restore and reliable off site disaster recovery. HP deduplication technology can reduce the amount of backup data you need to store by up to 95 per cent and can deliver backup speeds of up to 100TB/hr.

• It’s less mechanical so it’s writing to hard drives and we’ve had no problems with it whatsoever during the year we’ve been using it. It’s saved us so much time as well because we don’t have to troubleshoot the migrations every day. We know that those migrations are going to happen and that’s taken a weight off a lot of peoples’ minds, particularly those running our out of hours services.
• We were creating so much data that even with two huge libraries and over 100 tapes, it only had the capacity to keep backups for three weeks. With deduplication on the virtual tape library it’s now achieving a compression ratio of 16:1 which means it can keep the backups for six months.
• Deduplication also reduces the number of disks required which reduces space, energy and cooling costs.
• Since the staged back-up happens in the background there is no impact on the network so back-up times are not an issue. However, even with the added work of deduplication, StoreOnce is delivering a transfer rate of up to 7GB/min.

Since the staged back-up happens in the background there is no impact on the network.

Came with two additional enclosures to put the drives in and you can add another one. We ordered the additional enclosure, it arrived, we racked it up, connected it into the VTL and ran a command to say ‘recognise this enclosure - expand to this enclosure’ and it just did it. You don’t lose anything because the data that is on the existing enclosures just spreads out across the new enclosure.

HP offered as much or as little support as we required so we did the implementation ourselves. It was checked over by an HP engineer and signed off in two weeks. HP provides support with a nine to five next business day callout. HP comes to visit us and we have conference calls, presentations and demonstrations. That is the kind of interaction we’re getting.

HP provided a Webinar overview of the virtual tape library, gave us access to HP Labs and also sent in two technical specialists to talk through the product, demonstrate it and answer all our questions. However, what swung the deal for us was that we were able to have the kit on loan for up to three months. If you don’t like it HP come and remove the kit. If you do like it you just pay for it and keep it. That was brilliant because I didn’t want to go through the process of buying something and then find it didn’t operate in the way we wanted or was incompatible with certain backup software.

Our storage infrastructure was founded on an HP StorageWorks EVA 4400 disk array and when demand increased, a further EVA 6550 array was added.

It integrates very well with our backup software. Creating a new VTL is very easy. You just go into the system and create the new library saying what kind of emulation you want, how many drives and how many tape cartridges and it creates it. It has a whole range of emulation types and most backup software will support one of the emulations that StoreOnce will use.

We did the implementation ourselves.

We have not so far computed the amount of money saved but efficiency and service standards have certainly increased. Previously, if someone lost a file it could take 10 minutes to locate and load the appropriate tape. Now, the restore time is around five seconds.