HPE StoreOnce Reviews

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.

Excellent deduplication ratios.

It did not improve the way my organization functions: It was just an alternative method to accomplish what was being done a different way.

The UI is rather dated and not intuitive. Also, the setup is rather complex and you need to understand the product to best leverage it.

The GUI has a look from the traditional HP interfaces of 10 years ago. The layout is confusing as it is designed for someone that really understands the underpinnings of StoreOnce. The P6500 is basically a pair of DL380 servers running a Linux distribution clustered with all the necessary hardware and then is presented as a single StoreOnce appliance. Many of the menus in the GUI provide drill down capabilities that can get you deep into the inner workings of the appliance but, unless you know what you are doing, it is more there for support to utilize. While the appliance is a single cluster you are really working with each node individually further complicating management of the device. You need to put some thought into how you will distribute the workload across the nodes because the appliance does not provide any mechanisms for load balancing. While HPE claims StoreOnce will work with CommVault, our experience was that the use case was very narrow. While the P6500 has some beefy hardware the software is the Achilles heel. We found that as the dataset grows the P6500 becomes bogged down in housecleaning tasks that conflict with the incoming workload.

3 months.

The product did not scale well and had several issues where it bogged down under load. When used with a non HPE backup product, you really need to optimize the StoreOnce and your backup product to work well together.

Support was good, better than average, but left a little room for improvement.

We were using native backup (Commvault), which was unreliable. We selected this as a method to improve and better scale our backup deduplication, but it turned out StoreOnce introduced enough inconsistencies and incompatibilities, we actually went back to Commvault’s native deduplication.

You need vendor assistance to get the product properly set up and configured.

Vendors supplied resources for install and initial configuration assistance.

Make sure you understand your use case very well, go over it in detail with the vendor and get commitments that it is compatible with your use case.

We use HPE StoreOnce for data backup.

The platform's price could be lower. We export data from websites every week. The processing speed is very slow.

We have been using HPE StoreOnce for a year.

I rate the product's stability a ten out of ten.

We have 300 HPE StoreOnce users. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support has a good response time. I reached out to them regarding a hard disk failure issue. They called me, understood the problem, and replaced the disk within two hours.

The initial setup is simple. It requires administrative executives to work on the process and takes a day or two to complete.

I rate the product's pricing a seven out of ten.

I rate HPE StoreOnce an eight out of ten. It is a good solution in the market.

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 use StoreOnce for backup storage, copying all backup data to it. We are customers of HPE. 

The main benefit for me is from the deduplication and encryption features. StoreOnce provides an efficient and solid storage-saving destination for backup. It has a catalyst feature supported by most backup solutions that provides duplication even before copying the data. It saves bandwidth on the fly and saves storage space. It does a good job. 

Hardware maintenance involves some downtime for backup destination storage. It could be a problem for some people. I'd like to see some improvement in terms of the high availability of computer resources required. In addition, extra security is always welcome. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The scalability depends on the module. They have a lot of modules for the product and some are expandable while others come with a specific maximum capacity.

We receive good customer support. 

In my previous job the company used Dell EMC Data Domain. It's also a good solution, but a little more complex in terms of configuration and installation. But it's a good working solution. 

I find the initial setup straightforward. It helps to know something about infrastructure and network connectivity. It takes about half an hour to get it up and running and integrated with your backup solution. 

We've seen a return in that StoreOnce saves money by dedicating the data and saving storage.

Licensing costs are reasonable when you consider the benefits. We have a permanent license.

I recommend this solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

• 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.

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.