HPE StoreOnce Reviews

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.

It performs pretty well with minimal to no issues.

It has allowed us greater storage with a reduced footprint. It also works well with our servers – including our Dell servers. It was important that we have an integrated environment.

We had some initial driver issues, but I think the newer release has changed all that. The one issue I have is the maintenance package – it's very expensive. If I were to renew it, it would remain expensive and not cost effective. The initial proposal was inconsistent with what I found in terms of maintenance and renewal costs. A break/fix-type package would be better.

I've used it for four years.

It is pretty stable; excellent, in fact. I had one very minimal hard-drive failure.

We recently added more and it went very well. It's easy to add to this product.

8/10 for both. Issues were dealt with quickly and efficiently.

We were previously using a different solution but our storage needs grew and we decided we needed a new solution.

It was straightforward.

We had an HP engineer come in for implementation. He was excellent.

Dell and IBM. We chose HP because of the price and the vendor support.

The two things that we looked at were performance and cost.

This particular product is stable, and the support has been good. If you want a reliable and reasonably-priced product, I would recommend it.

• Redundancy
• Ease of use
• Scalability
• Disaster recovery

The greatest benefit to us has been lowering costs.

I'd like to see the following features added in:

• More detailed reporting
• More granular reporting
• More features in the CLI

Excellent.

Excellent.

Excellent. There has been an integrated partnership with the ability to answer any and all questions.

We were using a different solution, but it was too costly so we needed to switch.

The initial setup was straightforward. HP took a hands-off approach, which was good, and they let us do a lot of it on our own. We therefore didn’t have to do cross-training and we were able to do a lot of trial and error, which was good for us as well.

We also looked at EMC.

Most important criteria to look for includes:

• Price
• Features
• Functionality
• Ease of use

Definitely look at this solution as a viable option as it is cost effective and reliable.

The most valuable is the deduplication ability, but file sharing is also really good.

We saw less capital outlay after implementing the solution.

For subsequent models, I would like HP to improve deduplication rations for tiny files numbering near a trillion, which they do in our business. StoreOnce doesn’t work for our class of data, which is small, and needs to include more genomic and medical research as test cases.

I have been using StoreOnce D2D for four years.

Stability was good but undersized for what we needed. We weren't able to de-duplicate what we needed.

It was not able to scale for us; we had to buy another solution (X9000) to store copies.

I found HP to be helpful, but they asked too many questions and were not really able to help our business.

We were in need of backing up petabytes of data for medical databases.

We had experience with the solution, so it was relatively simple.

• EMC
• Comvault

The most important criteria for us is reliability.

If you work for a medical research institute or something with very small files, then this solution may not be for you. Your best move is to do a POC.

• Faster backup and restore process
• Data de-duplication mechanism

With D2D2T appliance, and backup jobs reconfiguration we are reducing the backup tapes count. The appliance offers a fast backup and restore process, and a data replication mechanism to a remote site location. This ensure data center backups disaster recovery.

• Data capacity graphical interface

I've used it for three years.

No issues during the deployment.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10/10.

10/10.

This is the first solution we have implemented.

It was straightforward, because we had chosen the right template for our needs and all the connectivity was prepared before the device was on site.

It was implemented through the local HP support team. They provided us with excellent support and knowledge of the product technology.

Always follow the vendors best practice and guidance to avoid any problems.

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.

De-duplication is valuable because it is a technique to take backups of unique data only. We have to do backups on a daily and weekly basis, where the daily one is incremental and the weekly one is a full backup. When we ran this type of backup on a physical cartridge, it would take up a huge amount of space as there is no de-dupe with cartridges. When using de-dupe, backups take less space than they previously did, and this minimizes the costs to our company.

The de-duplication feature saves us storage space.

The performance could be improved.

I've been using it for one and a half years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We're unable to expand our storage capabilities smoothly.

It's good.

We are not getting any direct support from HP, but we are getting support from their partner. The support is relatively good.

This is the first solution that we have used.

It is straightforward.

We used a vendor team who were 8/10.

This was done by the planning team.

I recommend using the upgraded version of this product.

VTL with deduplication because with deduplication, you can have spare storage space.

Interoperability with other vendors backup software.

I've used it for two and a half years.

In the beginning, we had a lot of problems with bad firmware.

We had problems with the various firmware versions.

No issues scaling the product.

It is very high.

Customer service is very high.

We did, and we switched because we needed a VTL solution with deduplication.

It was simple, especially to integrate it with our existing EMC network solution.

We implemented it in-house.

We also looked at EMC DataDomain. We chose StoreOnce because it was cheaper by more than 60,000 Euros.