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.

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.

The deduplication feature is awesome. The storage space has been cut down by at least 50% and on some instance greater reduction has been achieved. Here is a current example showing the space savings: Actual User Data Store 44.9TB, Actual Size on Disk 4.0TB with an 11.3 dedupe ratio. This was only one of my libraries on the StoreOnce 4430 device.

Please refer to the answer above about valuable features. The space saving on storage of actual user data also has a cost savings attached to it. We do not have to extend the actual storage space as quickly now due to the space savings of the deduplication feature.

The auto load balancing between VTL Libraries has been not as efficient as it should have been. I have manually load balanced between my libraries to maintain a tight control.There have also been bug fixes in the past for their auto load balancing feature. I would like to see this greatly improved so that I feel that it is trustworthy enough to utilize this feature.

I've used it for one and half years in an enterprise environment with HP DataProtector v7.0

No issues during deployment of the 4430 device into the enterprise environment.

Not with this current model 4430, but with a previous model we did have stability issues and these have been resolve with the 4430 model.

No issues with scalability. We purchased an additional 20TB shelf with the 4430 device (which came with a 20TB shelf included in the package we purchased).

HP’s customer service is outstanding. Turnaround time on parts for us is four hours and we also have them in less time than that. The HP service representatives are knowledgeable, friendly and are very easy to speak to. They are people who don't read from a script, but actually have a working knowledge of the equipment.

It's outstanding.

No, and we chose StoreOnce as we are currently an HP enterprise environment.

In most ways it was straightforward, however, you need to be an experienced network administrator to install this device.

It was done as an in-house implementation. However, we currently work with an HP partner in all our enterprise purchases. They're called High Performance Technologies, Inc. in Palm City, Florida, and the IT team at this business are outstanding and they all keep up to date with their HP certifications. They work with HP to obtain the best pricing for the equipment we need to ascertain. With this business relationship, comes years of trust and we know that they understand our enterprise network topology and make recommendations based off that long term knowledge.

The cost savings of not having to continually purchase additional shelf space has been the driving force of staying with this outstanding product.

The original cost was approximately $250,000. Included in that was the device itself and 40TB of storage space.

We did evaluate other options but due to the fact that HP has set the standard, we stayed with them.

I've had little to no issues with either the StoreOnce 4430 device or the DataProtector software. I would highly recommend this type of backup system for enterprise environments.

Read the documentation provided by HP on their website and research the web to avoid any possible issues during implementation.

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 most valuable features for us are the ease of use, the reliability, and the exceptional deduplication that we get across that data that we store on those devices.

We use it primarily for storage of backup data. We need to keep large numbers of historical backups and they typically repeat. It's a lot of data that is the same, but has to be kept for the purposes of historical reasons. You have to go back to points in time and storing the data on standard disks is wasteful and inefficient.

We needed a deduplication of parts. We've tried a number of different options and we settled on StoreOnce's being the most efficient and the fastest technology that met the price point that we were looking for.

In the service provider business, we are competing with a large number of other organizations and a lot of the time price is what matters to customers. We need to be competitive. We need to be able to provide a service at a price point that meets market expectation and this is a particular consideration in what we were looking for. The deduplication storage appliances and StoreOnce in particular does that by allowing us to provide lower price cloud storage for customer data

We would like to see some improvements in the Veeam Backup & Replication integration. It's good, but it has a lot of room to improve. In particular around the inability to easily move data between StoreOnce appliances. Also, there are some limitations around how it can be implemented for Cloud Connect repository storage. We currently have to use SMB Shares rather than proper Catalyst integration.  It's an interesting scenario, because Veeam tell us that it's the way HPE's StoreOnce Catalyst integration works and of course, HPE are saying that it's Veeam who have to work with us on this. We are hoping that they will get together and come up with a good solution and vision, too.

We have been using HPE StoreOnce appliances for just over two years now.

We've had failed disks but we've not lost any data and HPE's support has been very good. We did have some difficulty with the phone home functionality originally. Oddly enough, in one case, a firmware update fixed that for one of the devices. Overall, we found them to be very reliable.

I think it's interesting. The first one we did, we paid for HPE to install it, so they went through the whole setup process and everything else. I suspect that's probably why they normally get you to pay for it, because we did it ourselves from the second one and it was fine. It's not simple. It's not the click and point; it's command line. It's more technical; it's not a simple process, not like their wizards that you get with most of their products.

To be honest, we were quite happy with the price, but we always want things cheaper than they are. I think for what we got, we felt that the price was quite reasonable comparing it to other products that provide that same level of functionality; it was priced quite well in the market. We are looking for larger StoreOnce deployments for other requirements at the moment. Again, we are finding the price point quite attractive.

From that point of view, no problem at all. I'm just trying to think from a licensing point of view, they do seem to like charging for every little component. If you want to put a 10Gb adapter in there, there is a license charge for that. If you want to put in a fiber channel adapter, there is a license charge for that. On the whole, it hasn't been a limiting factor for us at all.

We looked at EMC Data Domain. We looked at Microsoft Storage Server on a number of different appliances, including an HPE option there. We found with Windows Storage Server, the performance wasn't there. It just didn't meet our requirements. We use Veeam backup and replication, and the integration that StoreOnce provides works really well. We have a very strong relationship with HPE and in the end they kind of swayed us.

I wouldn't want to say it's perfect because there is room to improve, but for what we are using it for, we are finding it does the job really well.

From a data point of view, you've got to be confident that the data you're storing is going to be deduplicable. Otherwise, you're not going to get any savings. If you're storing prededuplicated data, highly compressed data, data that doesn't repeat, you just wasted money on expensive disks, because you're paying a premium for the benefit of the data to be deduplicated.

You obviously want to be sure that the data that you're putting there is going to compress very well. We knew that was the case, so it was a no-brainer for us. I think we got a bit more deduplication than we were expecting, which is always wonderful. It doesn't always happen that way.

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.

The most valuable features of HPE StoreOnce are the single storage, disaster recovery, and configuration. Additionally, the feature to connect two stages together is useful.

I have been using HPE StoreOnce for approximately 10 years.

HPE StoreOnce works well, it is stable.

The scalability of HPE StoreOnce is excellent.

I am the only one using this solution in my organization. 

It is difficult to solve issues with this solution remotely. I prefer to use the knowledge base platforms. The response time could improve.

I have not used other solutions prior to HPE StoreOnce.

The initial setup of HPE StoreOnce is easy and the configuration is quick. It took 30 minutes to implement.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate HPE StoreOnce a nine out of ten.

It's a leading-edge technology with the capabilities it brings. We need to buy less of it, which means it's more economical. We also really benefit from the GUI capabilities.

We're also able to create service stacks that are beneficial across other HP products.

It makes it a lot more cost-effective because you're not buying ten pieces of technology separately. We bought it as a stack, racked it together, and it brought efficiency in terms of management, which means we've needed less resources.

While the setup was simple because of HP's involvement, it's been complex to run because of a third-party. They put it in a shiny new case and started changing some things. If they'd have left it alone, it would have been fine.

Our partner brought the technology to us, bought it on our behalf, and are running it on our behalf. They told us that they have a lot of knowledge and that they know how to run it, but in reality they don't and have not followed best practices. So now, they're kind of moved out. We're getting our hands around it ourselves, and it's behaving a lot better.

We're outsourced with a partner who recalls a larger amount of problems with the product.

We're able to scale it out to other centers.

I've used my HP account team, if that counts as technical support. They've been fantastic.

For me it was very much a legacy decision. People who were originally involved are no longer with us.

It was fairly simple to set up because we had HP involved.

Our partner implemented it for us, and the results have not been good.

The price puts me off. It's definitely on the high side.

Don't be fooled by other organizations' marketing. Do your homework and make sure it suits your needs.