HPE StoreOnce Reviews

So I’m not the technician, I don’t look at all the different bells and all the things it does but for me the space that it uses is a valuable feature. The compression ratio has been much better than our past solution. Our SQL database backups are getting 56:1 compression ratio and to me that’s incredible. Some of the other stuff is a little less but we’ve got an average of 25:1 and that definitely beats what we had before.

Well benefits that I’m seeing on the StoreOnce are definitely the speed to recover. I can trust the data is there. When we had the quantums in the replication it was taking up to a month, the data would be partial. I trust the data so the benefit is that the data is there. If somebody calls me and needs data recovered, I know I have it.

New features, I don’t know. I expect HP to know that stuff and they’re asking the questions and other people smarter than me know what they need. It does what I need right now. There’s nothing that I could think of that it’s missing.

I don’t like to talk about these things but so far stability on the system has been perfect, no issues. So I have two 4300’s and that came with Catalyst which was new to that platform. So when we had the systems put in the technician that came out actually hadn’t seem them before. So that was maybe the only hiccup but they did a great job installing them. I didn’t have to do anything with it and it’s been running ever since.

My impressions of scalability would be- I’ll never need to much add more space. They did a great deal with me, they doubled the space I asked for. I have enough room for years, but it also is very easily scalable. If I need to put in more trays I can.

We have not used technical support. Now HP as a whole, I have on other servers and things like that but for 3PAR I actually haven’t had to use support yet and, like I said it’s been going on two years. I’m happy with that, I’m sure if I had to call them they’d be right there.

The solution that we had for backups was Quantum for the software NetBackup. We still use NetBackup today, we like it but the quantums were aging. The maintenance agreement on the quantums were costing us a fortune and it was actually cheaper to get something new than keep the old one running. The quantums had gotten to a state where replication between them was no longer working. It would take about a month to replicate.

Hardware was starting to fail on a regular basis and we knew we needed something. We’re a primary storage with EMC so we did look at Data Domain, but I buy a lot of stuff from HP. I knew their storage was great so let’s go look at the backup solution and HP just came in with a good price, I thought it was a good product. We bought the StoreOnce, so it’s two years ago now today and you know they’re running good ever since.

It was extremely straightforward and I think this is typical for any of the vendors. I mean I don’t have all this experience but what you’re talking about is just a storage platform. It’s just disk so all they need to do is put it in, present it so that the backup can see it and that was done and it was done by the tech in just a couple of days, and we had it up and running in a week with a whole new backup catalog and it was very easy.

We did look at NetBackup, they had an appliance but it was about twice the cost. I didn’t look at Quantum because we didn’t have a lot of success with them in the past. I probably could’ve looked at them but it didn’t feel like a partnership with me with them.

With everything that I buy from HP, I just don’t feel like a customer all the time, I kind of feel like a partner, and at Shields Health Care we like to collaborate and partner with people.

And it’s tough to say, what I wanted to look at was the data has to be accurate. And so if we’re backing up patient data, it’s critical. I mean everybody says their data is critical, in healthcare it’s critical. If I need to restore something I need to know it’s there, I need to know where it is, I need to know I can get it fast.

With the quantums we also had a tape solution in place and those tapes were offsite, sometimes it would take a couple of days to get the data back. So what the StoreOnce allowed us to do was to also get off a tape, which was important to me. I don’t trust tape, a lot of people do. With StoreOnce, I know this data is there and I can get it quickly. The speed that we can recover files now is incredible. Even if it’s something small it’s not critical. Say a user loses an email and we backed it up the night before, you can get that email back in seconds. It used to take us a long time.

We’d restore the entire mail store. You’re looking at the entire afternoon just to get some files back. We’re happy and with this upgrade we also upgraded NetBackup. So it’s not to say that the stuff that we had before wasn’t capable, it was time to get a new solution.

I did a panel this week on going into backup solutions. One customer was still using tape, recommendations for them was to go to StoreOnce. For me the maintenance has been cheaper, the implementation was easy, it's small product that doesn’t take up much space in my data center, and it’s been reliable and out-performed what I had used previously.

Peer reviews, anytime I pick up any new solution I like to know that a customer has already done, so I did reach out and talk to other folks that had been in the same situation. It’s tough to get the same exact situation but they had me call a couple hospitals in Boston. They all had great experiences, same ease of deployment that I saw, so those are very important to me. I like to know that someone else has done the same thing and had some results.

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 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.

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.

We hope to unify all our solutions, so because our storage is HPE and all our services are HPE, we also need to use StoreOnce for our backup. It has good features.

Support is the main thing. If we have any issue, it’s easy for us to track or investigate it, because we don’t have different solutions from different vendors. This is the main benefit we are getting.

I would like to see automatic restore and monitoring tools like a dashboard.

We started using it in 2015.

We have had some issues. We are working with HPE to solve all the issues. For example, when we try to restore, other solutions have automatic restore.
Currently, we need to do it manually and it takes a very long time. This is a critical issue, but we are working with HPE on it.

Also, the hardware is from HPE and the software is from another company that is part of HPE and this causes some problems. So, if we have any issue with the hardware, it’s solved quickly. But, if we have any issue with the software, for example, with the console, we need to reschedule the jobs or there is a delay in a job, we need to go back to that company through HPE. This takes time.

Scalability is fine.

We use technical support quite a bit and we are not so satisfied with them. I rate them 3/5.

HPE introduced us to this solution.

For us, we can save a lot on storage costs for doing backups. It integrates seamlessly with our backup solution, which is a third-party solution, not from HPE. We use Veeam; and StoreOnce works with them.

It works great for backing up Windows. Backups are much quicker now. Previously, it took 15-16 hours every day. Now it takes 3-4 hours maximum.

Replication of our site using Virtual Storage Appliance is really easy. We did not have any backup solution for our site before. Now, we just have Virtual Storage Appliance running on site almost without any configuration. We use it to replicate all our site backups.

I would like to see a better integration with Active Directory to identify users. Currently, we need to create separate accounts, so we need to have separate passwords to log in for assurance. It's not a big issue, but it is an issue. We would like to be able to use existing Active Directory accounts to directly authenticate users.

There could always be better performance. There is a little bit to work on in this area.

We’ve been using it for little more than a year.

It is stable. We hardly ever had an issues with it.

When we started, it was already quite large, about 200 TBs. So far, we haven’t had any need to scale up.

Technical support is quite efficient. We only had minor issues, but they were handled pretty quickly.

We built an almost entirely new IT infrastructure for a new stadium that we built. The new infrastructure had a lot more than it had before; so we knew we had to have a better backup solution.

The initial setup was relatively easy. We didn’t need to do a lot. They were already pretty well-packaged out of the box. Aside from the configuration and integration with the backup solution, we didn't have much to do.

We looked at EMC, IBM, NetApp, and some others which I cannot recall at the moment.

We are building an entirely new infrastructure. We chose HPE StoreOnce after considering the servers, the storage, and the backup all at the same time. HPE had a better global solution, especially in terms of the backup solution.

Look into intuitive solutions for storage space. Deduplication is really efficient. You can do deduplication directly with Veeam, the backup software, side now. We save on network and bandwidth.

The most important criteria for us when selecting a vendor was the integration of the old backup solution in the previous stadium, and the need to save on storage space.

• The product is very easy to use.
• Deduplication features are great, especially on Catalyst stores.
• We can also choose where to do the deduplication (source, media server or target).

The product has really improved the backup and restore for our infrastructure. It gives you great scalability options up to 1.7 PB and, according to the vendor, it can scale up to 34 PB using HPE inline deduplication. We were able to perform quick restores because of the elimination of tapes. It provides great features like VTL, NAS and StoreOnce Catalyst.

The support team needs improvement. Sometimes, it takes support a lot of time to fix the issue and majority of the cases have to be escalated to the lab.

I have been using it the last five years.

No Issues , Its pretty easy .

Stability’s good. I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Its good .

On a scale of 1-10, I would rate technical support a 6.

We previously used Data Domain. We switched to StoreOnce because of the complexity of the Data Domain system. Data Domain is a great product, but it’s complex to use.

Initial setup was pretty easy. We did not face any problem.

For licensing and pricing, I would recommend just pay as you go. It’s pretty easy to scale.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this product. We only chose this product because we use HP’s Data Protector as a backup application and it has great support.

Read the support matrix first. It is not supported on lot of the open systems such as OpenVMS or the IBM AS/400 iSeries.

We use HPE StoreOnce for data backup storage purposes.

The product's most valuable feature is stability.

The product's price could be better. 

We have been HPE StoreOnce for five years.

It is a stable product. 

The product is easy to scale. It is suitable for SMEs and large-scale enterprises as well.

HPE StoreOnce's technical support team is good.

Positive

It takes a week to install the product and requires one person to execute the process.

We take help from HPE's technical services for the product's installation.

The product's pricing is medium. It could be improved. We purchase its yearly license. There is an additional cost for support services.

I recommend HPE StoreOnce, especially for enterprises. It has more stability, extensive storage capacity, and less downtime. It's a good product for data backup storage. I advise small and medium companies to opt for less expensive solutions.

I rate it an eight out of ten.