HPE StoreOnce Reviews

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 If you happen to be out of date regarding FW or patches, then you are the problem and not the unit.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.

Compression of storage. Based on the amount of history that we've got to keep, it limits the amount of storage that we have to purchase.

It's more of a backup functionality. Backup really doesn't make a business do any better or any worse. It's really just storage of data. It's not a user interactive type process. They all go through and store data fine and they all go through and restore data fine. Is there really any business advantage of StoreOnce over some of the other vendors? Not really. It's just that we chose to work more with one vendor, so we get a better cost when we actually purchase stuff.

The beef I have not only with StoreOnce, but also all the Ops Bridge, the people who will be managing these things are going to be more your system administrators. They're not Java programmers. They want to try to do all the API's where people have to know Java to interface with them.

Whereas system administrators, they want to script stuff and so they're starting to turn a lot of their API's into command lines, which are wrappers around the Java API's. Lack of foresight of that is probably one of my biggest irks with HP on that.

I have no data on it as it's too soon in our use.

We've used NetBackup, then there's been some home-grown ones that people have done. StoreOnce is a backup solution with Data Protector in DDD and streaming through offsite storage. It works just fine. The big thing again, we come down to, is by having those products primarily with one vendor, we get a much better cost point.

We had no issues deploying it.

It works well with Data Protector. It works well with 3PAR and that's our environment and so it's a vendor specified solution.

The deduplication and the savings you get from that. We actually get a better performance with the source-side deduplication with catalyst store.

It sends less traffic over the network when you use the catalyst store, so it causes less congestion on the network.

Maybe when we do restores for Veeam, the way it has to re-hydrate all the deduplicated data, if there's a way to speed that up that would be a good feature, some kind of algorithm or something.

It's stable enough for our backup product. There's a couple of issues with the CIFS we were using with Veeam, but we're trying to use the catalyst stores now that Veeam 9 came out, and it seems to be working better so far, but we just started doing that like a month ago, so we're still in the testing phase.

It's good. You can scale out if you have the money and you can add a lot to it.

They've actually got really good tech support. If you have to do an upgrade, they do a remote session and they'll guide you through it.

We were using VLS, which was an HP product. It was basically a virtual tape library, and just basically straight to tape. They weren't performing well, and it was actually really slow.

That was before my time, so I'm not sure.

The only problems I ever saw was with the CIFs was the performance but like I said, we're trying to do the catalyst now. It's a required deduplication, and say your backup software doesn't do it or your backup software doesn't perform that great with deduplication, I'd look at StoreOnce, because it does all the deduplication on the backend.

For StoreOnce, we are using it in order to backup some databases. It works fine, and I think it's not a production device, but it still works fine. The time to do the backups is great for us because the last backups we used to have took at least 8 - 10 hours and at the moment the backups takes one hour or less.

It helps us with the backups of our corporate database in order to have the information backed up in case of disaster. It's great for us to take the information in minutes, instead of hours.

It's not big, but it could be smaller and take up less space in the data center. I saw some devices here that are smaller with more power, and I think that StoreOnce could be the same.

I think that we've had it for two years and it doesn't have any issue at this moment.

I've never had to contact tech support.

We had an EMC Data Domain device, but I don't remember the model of it. We switched because HP promised us that it would be easier to manage, easy to implement with the technicals details we use each day.

It was quick and easy to install.

The time to implement, the time to acquire the solution, integrating with our infrastructure was easy and the price was very good.

You need to work with a partner that knows the solutions deeply in order to implement the services and the solution well. It allowed us to provide the services that our customers needs.

StoreOnce is a new product for me. Throughout the years, as director in certain companies, I've been a big EMC Data Domain customer. We've purchased a couple StoreOnce, and so far I really like the product. It's very similar to Data Domain. It was very easy to stand up. We had it going in one day. It was our target for our backups for CommVault, to write all of our backups to. Now we replicate from one StoreOnce to the other, so as far as DR and contingency, it's really nice. The ease of use is excellent and the price point is very competitive. It's really good.

There's no tape involved. The tape is gone. Our backups are very easy to use with the StoreOnce. It's takes very little configuration. We don't have to babysit the device. Every once in a while, we just go in and look at it and see what kind of dedupe rates we're getting and check on our storage, etc. So far it's been a very easily operational situation with the StoreOnce.

Where I've used Data Domain in the past as another application - another use for Data Domain, maybe StoreOnce can improve by not just being a target for open systems, meaning Windows or Linux boxes. In the past, I've used Data Domain with, an IBM AS/400 iSeries, as a backup target to an iSeries platform, so they could possibly improve there.

The biggest thing that StoreOnce is very easy to use, just like Data Domain is very easy to use. The price point of StoreOnce is really something people should be looking at.

In my experiences with Data Domain is that it's going to be very expensive to maintain. To keep that after the purchase, it's very expensive to maintain. Not only on the initial purchase, but also on the ongoing annual maintenance fees of Data Domain.

It was very easy.

I had HPE do it.

Even the small one that I have over at the job site was not cheap.

If it had a little more functionality with other platforms, it would be rated higher. Really look at that product and compare it to the direct competition and compare it as far as features, price and annual maintenance and I think you'll see that StoreOnce should really take a hard look at that one.

It's very usable with the interface for the administration. It works with a lot of different applications so it is very scalable for other applications. You don't have to just backup the entire system but you can back up specific applications if you want.

From an operational standpoint it has increased our efficiency and we're able to save a lot of manpower and resources for mundane backup stuff that we've done in the past so that other people can focus on more strategic initiatives in our business.

One of the things that I think that's on the docket for implementation with StoreOnce is Azure and Cloud incorporation. Currently we are doing object copies with StoreOnce to take our backups and copy them to the cloud. But I know that the feature is actually going to be integrated even further in the near future with StoreOnce and Data Protector so that's one thing that we're looking forward to.

The product is great. I've been a 3PAR and StoreOnce customer for many years now and I am now a very strong backing of HPE's storage and backup infrastructures. It's been a really good experience for the past couple of years.

I think that what other products or other competitors are lacking is the use and the adaptation for other applications within Microsoft. If you wanted to backup SharePoint or SQL or clusters or other kind of features within Microsoft products with other backup companies or other partners they don't necessarily have that compatibility. If you have a large environment with a lot of diverse applications and systems and configurations, Data Protector definitely covers that and obviously StoreOnce is backing that.

They're excellent. Everything from pre-sales to post-sales and then just more on the sustainment model. They're eager to be engaged and they definitely take the extra to make sure that we're meeting our needs because obviously backups are important stuff. I would say they're leading the edge as far as customer engagement.

We were using other solutions previously. We initially started using 3PAR as our storage provider. As we went along that road we saw that 3PAR and their storage solution was really solid. We had a great experience with that so we kind of grew our footprint with HPE and we just added our StoreOnce. It's been a great experience.

It's actually very straightforward. A lot of the times when you're dealing with storage and architecture it can be very complex with other vendors. With 3PAR and StoreOnce, those setups are very easy and then you can hand it over to lower skilled admins to manage the systems because it doesn't take an architect to manage the system.

Veeam obviously does a lot of virtualization but it is only virtualization so we have a very diverse set of applications in our environment. You have NetBackup and Symantec that have their backups as well. They've been around for a long time but I think that the maturity of Data Protector at StoreOnce has really surpassed their technology and just usability and support. That's why we went ahead with StoreOnce.

StoreOnce is fairly new. Even this week, they're announcing a lot of new features for reporting and management. I think there's a lot of room for them to grow and it's exciting to see what they're going to come out with in the near future. I think it's a great product now and I think it's going to get even better in the next couple months.

I think the best thing to do is to get a demo. Try it out. Obviously its looking and feeling is more important than looking at a bunch of slides or a bunch of white papers so actually looking at and seeing how it works and see if it meets your requirements. Everyone has their specific environments and their unique criteria so that's really what we did and we're really happy with it.a