HPE StoreOnce Reviews

We've only just put it in, so I think for us it's a more efficient way of storage. Time efficient, man power, all of it. We have a very small team, so it just frees up the guys to do other things.

It's only been in for a couple of weeks, so can't really comment too much about what it's done yet.

I'd like it to be quicker.

So far, we've had no issues.

One of my engineers might have called, but I haven't.

We were using EMC, and my engineers put some pressure on me. They said we need to spend some money, so that's how I knew we needed to get something else.

It really came down to relationships. At the time it wasn't just going from EMC, it was also going from Cisco to HPE Networking. We went through a pretty good process, where we talked about our needs and requirements, and also comfort levels of technology change. Some of my engineers were a little reluctant to move away from Cisco. But HPE ecame and sat down and just said "We'll do whatever it takes. What do you need? What are your concerns?" Just worked with us in real detail: able to understand what our concerns were, where we were going, and making sure that the engineers were made comfortable. But also making sure, which was the last part which comes across the line, was that the technology was what we needed, was enough for growth. Whereas Cisco was just a "here's a quote, sent it to us" which I think for me swung me over to HP. The commitment to the customer.

Think about the next 10 years, where are you heading. Personally, I say HPE's a pretty strong organization. They send the right messages, saying the right things. They seem like a very digital company which is all about customer, and that stuff matters to me, whereas some of the competitors, they don't have that mindset. Cisco definitely doesn't have that mindset. I really think long-term about. Sure, Cisco had a lot more features, but we didn't really need them. So, that made the decision easier. For me, when I think about HPE, think about longevity. You want to invest in technology, you're almost investing in the company.

We don't have to go to a separate console to manage StoreOnce and another one for our backup application, one console. It's meeting our requirements now. For us, it's just a question of we've only been running it for about 3 to 6 months now. I'm looking for a full year. We are trying to test out some of the new features like the RMC product which helps integrate the StoreOnce with 3PAR and we're going to be bringing in our 3PAR storage very, very soon. We're looking forward to the ability of StoreOnce to integrate with other HP solutions that we purchased. We've looked at dedup technology for quite sometime, but we're primarily an HP shop. We wanted something that would integrate well into what we currently have.

One of the things we liked about StoreOnce is that it is a technology that scales very well. They have hardware appliances at the high end and they also have a virtual appliance. In our deployment, in our infrastructure, we needed both ends. It's the same interface, the same functionality. That's one of the things that we were really liked about it.

We've had some ongoing challenges in our backup infrastructure being able to complete the job successfully, have good knowledge that our data was secure. We knew we needed to improve upon that. StoreOnce and a dedup technology was where we wanted to go. As far as once we've implemented the StoreOnce, it's achieved what we thought it would do and then some. One of our, it wasn't my primary objective, our secondary objective was to reduce the tape out. By implementing StoreOnce, we've been able to dramatically reduce the number of tapes that we have to keep in our environment.

We've had a real challenge with our resorts in making sure the backups are performed and completed and we're able to do that and bring the dedup images back to our central location. We are a much higher rate of success in our backups. It's built on HP hardware, no problem there.

The virtual appliance, it's virtualized so no problems at all with stability.

Scalability, that's one of the other features that I really like about it, especially in the virtual plans. All you do is if you run out of space, you add another VMDK and it just scales up seamlessly. You don't even have to reboot.

We've had a couple of challenges where we've had to engage them and they're fantastic. I mean they listened, problems get escalated if they need to get escalated. They're extremely helpful and what really impressed me is it's like they're very knowledgeable of the BURA environment. They were well aware of the challenges that I was facing with my users. If we had an outage, they were well aware of that I had to find a different place to store the data, what the risks were. Yeah, they're fantastic. I love the technical services that we get from them. We had some bumps as far as implementation. Part of the challenge that we have is our primary data centers are hosting centers, so they're lights out.

We used HP's technical support for the startup services. They helped us with the implementation.

We don't have staff at our data center. That was a bit of a challenge for scheduling, but then that is agnostic of the product that you're trying to install. Through the startup services that we purchased from HP services help desk because we have to integrate this with our backup product which we were a semantic shop, so we had to integrate that, the StoreOnce technology with that. They were very helpful in getting that done. Yes, it's slips in very well. One of the things we really like about it is that you managed everything from the backup console. Our backup administrator, well he is aware, but he manages it just like it's another store. The deduplication, all that happens in the background.

It's just amazing. No cost. As long as you have the StoreOnce appliance with catalyst, there's no cost for that. It is a nice feature that's going to keep my DBAs happy.

That's not only HP, it's the support. We get pre sales support, we get post sale support. We get it in the implementation, so not just the product, but it's the people behind the product as well. If I had a peer asking me about the StoreOnce, I'm a technical consultant from background so I'd asked him what problem are they trying to solve and make sure they got the right one.

With StoreOnce, it's not a point solution. It has to fit well into your environment. You have to understand what problems are you trying to solve so that you implement it properly. We had to integrate like in our case, we had challenges with remote circuits that we had to make sure the low bandwidth replication. We had to integrate it with semantic. Unless you have the same problem as I am, you wouldn't necessarily implement the same solutions. Through that implementation, I learned a lot about the product and then coming to events like this, HP Discovery you learn more. You learn some trips that you didn't. For example during this trip, I learned about the catalyst plug in that I can use for my database products so that my DBAs can do their backups direct to StoreOnce. I didn't know that was available.

Our client is a government office. They use StoreOnce to store information about the weather as they specialize in meteorology data.

Most of our clients are medium-sized enterprises.

I think it's a good solution. The hardware is strong and all the equipment has a good infrastructure. Personally, I think it's the best storage product in HPE for small to medium-sized businesses.

HPE StoreOnce should come with a detailed installation guide. 

I have been using HPE StoreOnce for two weeks.

With StoreOnce, there are many different options for increasing the storage. I believe it's a good solution if a company needs more space for a reasonable price — it's easy to scale this solution.

The technical support is good. I used their technical support for assistance when I was trying to download the console management software — they resolved that problem in an hour or so. 

StoreOnce is very easy to install. No specialized software is required in the installation process. Deployment is also very easy.

The initial setup is not complex but it really depends on the type of server. For example, when you use a normal server, it requires a unique process to install the complete solution. With the StoreOnce server, you have to use another method to install the solution because it's very different. This server has its own software pre-installed in the equipment, so it's different than a normal server.

Overall, deployment took two days. One day to install the hardware, and another day to deploy the software.

Our client evaluated Dell, Lenovo, and Synology. Synology is a cheaper solution for storing data. However, our client was looking for reliable equipment with full-support — Synology doesn't come with support. With Dell and Lenovo, it was also complicated to obtain support in Ecuador. HPE provides the best support in Ecuador.

I would absolutely recommend HPE StoreOnce — it's a good product. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE StoreOnce a rating of ten.

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.

It provided us help at a time when we needed a lot of storage quickly. It provided us that storage and it was really easy to deploy. Needless to say, we were very happy with that.

We're actually not happy with StoreOnce because we had to delete our backups three times. HP support was unable to recover them. We can't even log in to fix the problem ourselves. There was no indicator or any type of system alert that we would not be able to recover the files. We only figured that out once we couldn't backup anymore. When we tried to do a restart, it was not accessible.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability improved as they released updates and patches for the software.

It's a good product to scale out because we can just buy more appliances and then we'll easily have more space.

Technical support is OK. When we determined that we couldn't recover the data in our StoreOnce, HP support said we should copy everything to another StoreOnce while fixing the defective one. We didn't have a spare StoreOnce, so this suggested fix was disappointing.

We used ArcServe GPT, but we didn't have enough space for traditional servers and ProLiant disks.

The initial setup was straightforward. That's the idea of the product -- straightforward to implement.

We wanted to restore the files we backed up, and on three occasions we were not able to, and this got us in a lot of trouble, so I don't think I will take this risk again. Use something else.

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 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.

We are the system integrators based in Qatar and this is one of the products that we provide to our customers as a backup solution. 

The primary use case is for data backup, mostly for virtualization infrastructure.

The most valuable features are the deduplication and compression capabilities. Also, in terms of performance and recovery, it has good capabilities.

It's a simplified product, more or less with plug-and-play capabilities. It has three flavors of integration being storage, NAS storage, and a backup system. These components are vital and with this product, it's like having three in one box.

It can be paired with the Veeam backup software.

Pricing could be reduced

The GUI and its user-friendliness have some room for improvement.

From a technical point of view, it's a stable solution.

HPE StoreOnce has the highest scalability in the market. It is very good compared to products such as Dell Data Domain.

I am satisfied with the technical support.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Price-wise, it comes with a high price tag when compared to other products.

HPE has CloudBank capabilities. For example, it has 1.7 petabytes of CloudBank storage. For anyone who is looking for a long-term archive, as well as a backup solution, this is the ideal product. It comes with a three-year warranty and it's stable when it comes to base start-up solutions.

This solution offers both on-premises and public cloud deployments. If the customer needs on-premises backup then it is capable of that, or if the customer requires long-term retention, for example, five years, or for ten years, then they can keep the data in an archive system such as cloud backup or cloud volumes.

Overall, it's a very good product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It's an on-premise deployment and can be scalable to public cloud.