HPE StoreOnce Reviews

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 features my clients appreciate more is the deduplication ratios. It's amazing. That technology can put tons of TBs in a fewer space.

The benefits are clear. They need to store their backups in a single space with this feature of deduplication, compression. The administration is so easy for them and the integration with their backup application they are using, like Data Protector, are so transparent.

The licence procedures: There is a team for the deployment and there's a team for the licence, but they don't communicate with each other. That's an issue for us.

My customers don't have any issues, important issues, with StoreOnce.

It's not necessary to scale the smaller equipment, and we haven't had to scale the larger equipment as our customers aren't there yet.

HPE have better support - hardware and software - compared to the competition. They appreciate it so much. Their response time is so good.

Complex for a technician is not an issue because it's very clear. Putting the StoreOnce in production is transparent for a technician who has a sense of knowledge and basically operating systems knowledge too.

We start up the equipment and we need to put the licence number and the serial number of the equipment but I had a problem with that. It is not clear which serial number we need to use. I had a problem with a client who used one serial number but that serial number wasn't the correct one. We needed to open a case for re-licensing the equipment. It takes about two weeks to put in the licence. It's not OK for us, for the client. It's the only issue I have with the StoreOnce.

The good feature about StoreOnce is, its speed. It's integration with 3PAR, so you can do express backups. You can take your snapshots from your 3PAR and you can back it up directly to your StoreOnce. The other nice feature about that is, you can then take your data, and if you wanted to, you can replicate it to another StoreOnce. Even from there, you can have that ... Then you can also offload it Tape. With 3PAR and with StoreOnce, we kind of have an end to end solution for the customer. The other nice thing about StoreOnce is, it supports VTL. You can do a VTL type configuration on your StoreOnce, you can do Catalyst stores, and then you can also do NAS stores.

This is just a personal thing for me as it comes down to documentation and giving clear information. If you want to do express backup from 3PAR to StoreOnce, you need the RMC license, you need Virtual Copy on 3PAR, and then you need the Catalyst license. I've been to a bunch of tech talks, and they never really say this specifically. It's in the quick specs, but I remember my boss asking "What are you adding that license for," and I said, "It's required. Here's the documentation, but I don't think the message is clear enough." You know what I mean? I understand people need to understand the technology, but when it comes down to it, if you're creating a parts list, a build that's supposed to go into a customer's site and work, if you don't know all the parts and pieces, then you've got a failed implementation. That's just my personal view.

It doesn't replace traditional backup, but if you want a solution that can back up your snapshots quickly and reliably, then StoreOnce is good.

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.

The most valuable features of StoreOnce are ease-of-use and ease-of-configuration when compared to the old IBM Tivoli family solution that we're using.

The benefits compared to the old solution are broad flexibility, ease-of-configuration, and ease-of-maintenance. We use it for part of our backup solution.

For us, nothing is missing at the moment and over time this will probably become clearer. We are going towards the cloud environment at some point or a hybrid cloud, so it could be something on that front, but we are not working with the cloud yet. For our purposes, it's functioning perfectly fine. We get the data we want from it.

However, you need lot of knowledge before you start out. Maybe that could be improved.

We have not had any stability problems.

Scalability is something that we haven't really needed to utilise but that was one key factor when we chose it over the other solutions. We haven't had to do any scaling yet. We have in the range of 10 to 20 TBs.

We have not yet used technical support for StoreOnce, but we have been using it for less than a year.

We were basically upgrading the whole data center and we wanted to stick with one vendor as a provider of all the hardware. It was kind of logical to also look for a solution from HPE.

I was involved in the initial setup. We had a technician from the partner who was providing the solution helping to set it up. It was very straightforward. I'm comparing to the old solution, which was kind of a pain in the neck. To set up the StoreOnce, all that was needed from us was the IP address and some background information on how we would use it. That was about it. From all the things that we set up in our data center at that time, this was probably the simplest.

Everybody wants to see lower cost, but pricing was competitive.

We also looked at Dell. We went with HPE because we want everything to be from one vendor.

My advice is to use trusted advisors. You can only know so much. It's good to discuss things with an advisor.

When looking for a vendor, the cost is, of course, important, but the partnering with HPE or another vendor and the range of products they offer is the most critical factor.

It's cost effective, technologically advanced, and very scalable. It integrates with the rest of the HPE infrastructure, like 3PAR, for example.

From a business point of view, it enables us to pay closer attention to our caps and our competitive cost level.

Because it integrates with other HPE systems, it is easier for us to manage compared to the system we had before.

I would mostly want to see some technical improvements in some very specific areas. For example, a feature that is missing, compared to the competition, is the ability to globally duplicate all systems.

EMC Data Domain can deduplicate globally among all volumes, whereas HPE StoreOnce's deduplication is per single volume. Thus, it is a little less efficient, if you have several volumes.

So far, it looks quite stable.

Scalability is very good.

We get technical support from our partner and also from HPE personnel. The support is very good.

The previous system reached its end of life and it was becoming obsolete. It was no longer performing enough for the company. Business is flowing, fortunately; so we needed a faster and more scalable solution. The switch to HPE StoreOnce was a planned investment.

I would say the initial setup was straightforward, but I was not involved from an operational perspective. I am involved in that I am responsible for the teams; so I was involved in setting the objectives and I was informed of the key facts. I’m not the one who strokes the keyboard.

We actually work with HPE a lot, but also with Dell EMC. For now, we balance the distribution 50/50. There's some good in both vendors.

My advice to colleagues is to deeply explore the features of StoreOnce because they have improved in the last year. StoreOnce is not the market leader. The market leader now is without any doubt EMC Data Domain. Try not to just look at the market numbers, but also at the technology of the product. Give StoreOnce a try. Try the product before deciding to buy it.

The most important criteria when we choose a vendor is the technology. We are very technically oriented, so first we compare products in terms of technological level. By technology, I mean features, performance, and integration with other vendor solutions.

We put cost effectiveness a little lower in our evaluation. Price is obvious, but it is not the main thing for us.

The partnership with the vendor is very important. The partner must have strong competence in what they are selling to us. It is obviously very important to have a skilled and certified partner that helps you implement the product. This restricts the circle of possible vendors and partners to very few.

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.