HPE StoreOnce Reviews

We implement the full data centre - from A-Z. Our clients typically use the solution as a backup data destination.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the catalyst feature. It can integrate with various other backup solutions. also HPE introduced the cloud bank that can provide cloud storage for your data. 

The solution should continue to refine its integration capabilities. I also see they are starting to use cloud integration as well, which is good, but they should do more to integrate with it.

I've been selling the solution for five years now.

The solution is very stable.

catalyst integration can give you unmatchable performance.

Technical support is good. If it's not good we make it good because we, as a partner, offer technical support ourselves.

Most of our customers are switching from other backup solutions. Many have switched, for example, from EMC Data Domain. It was the most popular in our country at one time but many people are moving to StoreOnce.

The initial setup is one of the most user-friendly B2B user solutions. It's good, it's easy. Deployment usually takes less than one day. You only need one person for deployment and maintenance.

We mainly work with the on-premises deployment model. We're an HPE partner.

I would advise new users to check the integration if they already have a data solution in place.

I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for backup storage.

Nine years ago, we were relying on backup tapes only. Now, since we've moved to StoreOnce, as per the legal and compliance perspective we still have to use tapes, but we have reduced usage a lot. We don't have to transfer the tapes from one side to another side. That task has been reduced because we have StoreOnce in two locations, and we take backup on one appliance, and that appliance is replicated to the other side. The backup and restore speed is very fast, compared to tape. There is less administrative work. 

The speed and deduplication ratio are two of the most valuable features of the solution.

I'm using this product to save some files. It has a feature where I can make it as an SMB share. When I started using it for CIFS, the SMB share, had a limitation of 1,000,005 only. Considering 1,000,000 objects are in one share, it's too limiting.

The appliance doesn't have global deduplication, it has StoreOnce deduplication. It does not deduplicate across the appliance, it will deduplicate in one particular store. With global deduplication, I could store more data.

This appliance currently doesn't have SSD drives. I'm not sure if new models include them, but I believe if they can include NVMe or SSD drives as a cache device, they can increase the backup speed a lot and that can help with the global deduplication.

One of the reasons to not enable global deduplication was to not impact the backup and restore speed, but I believe if they include a cache device like NVMe or SSDs, then the drawback of enabling global deduplication can be removed. 

The solution is very stable. After nine years, I have yet to have a problem.

Scalability is good. When we bought the current model, 6500, we bought around 200 TB of capacity, and we are using more than three TB of data. In terms of scalability, we can go from 200 TB to 400 TB to 600 TB, or more. They also provide cloud banks, but I don't think we will be requiring that amount of storage in the future. Because of deduplication, we don't have to add so much physical capacity. Even if I add 32 TB or whatever the minimum capacity is, it can still hold lots of terabytes of data.

We have 1,300 users and three admin who are maintaining the solution. We use the solution every day to run backups.

Technical support is very good.

We didn't have another solution previously, in terms of backup storage, but in terms of software, I have used some other products like Windows deduplication. This solution, however, offers reliability and stability.

The initial setup is straightforward. Deployment took less than one hour. We have three admins, but I am the primary admin, so you only need one person for maintenance.

An HP consultant came to assist with deployment.  Deployment assistance comes with it when you buy the solution. Our experience with the deployment consultant was good.

The license is part of the hardware. You don't need to buy or renew it separately.

StoreOnce comes in a package: hardware and software. All the licenses come with it. Software licenses for backup solutions like Data Protector you do have to purchase separately, but in terms of the backup appliance, it comes with all the features and the license as part of it. You have to only purchase the application license but that is very cheap.

We did evaluate Data Domain from EMC, but I didn't like it because Data Domain has other limitations. In terms of density per rack, it was using more rack capacity. Also, they were selling three different products, so it was adding too much complexity. I decided to go with StoreOnce.

We are using the private cloud deployment model.

If you purchase the product, you will have peace of mind. You don't have to worry about the product at all. My only advice is, get it installed by an HP consultant, not by a third-party or partner, because the HP team will give you the correct advice before implementing. I strongly recommend going through the HP publishing best practices guide, for each and every hardware they have released as well. StoreOnce also has a best practices guide from HP. It will be a 10-20 page document. Go through it, and it will really help you to architect or design the solution prior to implementing it.

I would rate the solution 8.5 out of ten.

Deduplication and replication are both extremely important for storing huge chunks of data.

Secondly, now it has extended support to VMware and MS SQL via EMC.

Well, it has improved the organization in the sense we can back up our data into StoreOnce directly from stores etc., so it's become cheaper for us.

I would like to see it support open stack and also other vendors’ hardware, if possible, via EMC.

I have an existing EMC backup solution and HPE StoreOnce solution.

Typically this happens in case of M&A between two companies when two different companies use two different storage vendors. Now I want to move my data from EMC to StoreOnce, but I don't have a direct way to move this data. I suggest that if it would offer OpenStack support then we will be able to freely move data across.

I have been using it for six months.

I have not really encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. We haven’t faced any major issues.

HPE technical support is a bit slower compared to EMC, which might have a larger support team that can respond faster.

Its deduplication feature and 3PAR support were the primary reasons we selected it.

I didn’t install it, and I was not there while it was getting installed. However, as far as I’ve heard, they didn't face any major issues.

Just look into the cost factor if you have some other system already in place. Like, say you already have EMC products, then it's probably better to stick with them.

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.

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 most valuable features for us are the very high-performance deduplication and high deduplication rates. These features make it quite cost-effective.

We previously used a tape-based backup system with a tape library and off-site storage of tapes, which was very expensive to run. It also wasn't terribly reliable and we had constant issues with capacity. 

We migrated to StoreOnce and we're using the copy feature of StoreOnce to copy to another unit in a different location. We have the primary unit that we do backups to, and then we have another unit in our disaster-recovery site, and all the backups are copied over the WAN to the disaster-recovery site. It uses deduplication to do that too, so the bandwidth requirements are quite low. 

So we have a completely tapeless backup flow that is very low impact on our network and has very high reliability.

StoreOnce actually does pretty much everything we need. There are  quite a lot of features that we don't use at the moment such as virtual tape library and NAS. 

But the initial network setup is not intuitive, and this could be improved.

I've used it for 18 months.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

StoreOnce has been 100% stable in the eighteen months that we've been using it. We actually purchased an additional unit for a third location after the initial purchase of two units on the basis of the performance and reliability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

StoreOnce is not really complicated to set up. It's probably something that can be done by a typically-skilled systems administrator in a day or a half-day.

I think as long as you have a clear understanding of what it does and you're quite sure that that's what you need, then there isn't a better product. Certainly, in terms of the ease-of-use and reliability, we haven't had any issues with StoreOnce. It's definitely one of the products that I would recommend to anyone.

Its catalyst store and deduplication are valuable as it saves disc space. I'm not sure what the ratio is, to be fair, but it's significant. It's something silly like 240 terabytes if they were all expanded and it's occupying something like 20 terabytes, or something like that.

We haven't had the need to use reporting, but we've still got capacity and don't need to dive in. At some point we'll start reaching capacity, and we'll need to start drilling down a bit more into what it's doing.

We brought it in to transfer all of the services that were old and creaky onto a single platform. So we back up all of our VMs and all of our SQL boxes to it.

If it could do scheduling, then perhaps I wouldn't need to have Data Protector as a backup product. Data Protector is a software layer that schedules every night into the VMware layer and says, "Back these VMs up to the StoreOnce device." And it goes through the Catalyst stores and does all the kind of stuff that StoreOnce does. If StoreOnce could initiate the backup itself by a scheduling mechanism, then potentially we wouldn't need to have Data Protector do it, which would take something out of the chain for me. There's no problem with Data Protector, it's just something else. If I can keep it down to hardware and not have to go through a software layer, I think I'd get better performance.

We brought it in a part of a whole HP infrastructure about 18 months ago.

We've had no issues deploying it.

We've never had an issue with stability.

We've got four trays of discs, and I think we can add another X number of trays, so it's not going to be endlessly scalable, but it's going to be scalable up to X.

We had blades, 3PAR, and some fabric switches. We looked at a way to consolidate all of our backups. So, we had technology like Tivoli and CSN, and we had other little bits of backup, and we thought we'd go for a single product. As a part of the transformation, we brought in Data Protector, and that basically backs itself off to the StoreOnce.

We consider HP, and the pricing we get is good and reflects that. If it was an open marketplace, we'd look at anything and everything because we'd evaluate the marketplace for cheap D-to-D devices.

We use it to present virtual tape live-link to our NetApp so that we can backup our NetApp for NDMP to our StoreOnce. So virtual tapes are the concepts of a physical set of tapes. Imagine you've virtualized it, and you have to give it a size on disc, which because it's a virtual tape, it doesn't have to have the same constraints as a physical tape of four terabytes. A virtual tape can be X terabytes. We originally put them in and sized them too small. And when I had to go back, and we had something like 400 tapes. I had to edit each tape and increase its capacity so that we got better value out if it. I wish I could have just Shift-Select-Edit and changed it, which I couldn't do. So some level of automating that task cause you can imagine, going through 400 tapes is a lot of work. It can happen, and we didn't know at the time, and lesson learned. If we put another StoreOnce in with more BTLs, we'd know perfectly to set that size to be higher from the start. So, the advice would be if you're using BTLs, set them to your preferred maximum because you might not be able to batch.

The dedupe benefit, the granularity of specifying different retention and different policies for dedupe, you can go without dedupe, too. Sometimes you have applications that are doing compression and don't need the dedupe benefit. You have all that versatility in this scalable product, for sure.

I'm a storage supervisor in the media and entertainment industry. We use the StoreOnce and the 3PAR, as well. Our previous solution was tape only solution. We looked at the StoreOnce as a valuable stepping stone to get a lot of our backups done without the use of tape, so it was sort of an intermediary device to accomplish that goal. We're partnered with HP. We came alongside HP and they offered this solution as a viable alternative.

The stability has been rock solid. We have not had issues. There have been other platforms we've seen problems with. Other than sheer capacity in terms of size, the throughput has been adequate, so we haven't had really any issues to speak of. It's a scalable solution that gives us a lot of versatility. We're able to put these devices in remote locations if we need them, to help offload the tape infrastructure, and really meet the requirements of the site, whether it be the retention or the off-siting capability. Then, as those sites grow, we can expand them. It does give us a lot of versatility. The upgrade process, my understanding is, I haven't been directly involved, but it has been hitless. There really has not been downtime to do these.

The technical support is fantastic. Yeah, we've had a great experience with the StoreOnce device. We've even gotten folks on site when we've needed them to do firmware upgrades and those sorts of things where our technical abilities don't quite cut the mustard, so to speak. You know, we're pretty satisfied with where things are at right now. I can't speak to what we truly need in the coming weeks, months, years, from the StoreOnce platform, but I think what I've seen here so far, some of the solutions being offered as far as integration with the 3PAR would be an area that would be really interesting to see.

On the short list was to continue with IBM. We were in a TSM environment, and we had been with TSM for years and years. The HP Data Protector solution with the StoreOnce on the backend seemed like a logical next step for us, because we have other HP products in-house, including the 3PAR, for some of our tier one storage needs. I would give it at least an eight or a nine. Yeah, it's a rock solid platform for us. It's got a very direct application, and purpose. It's not trying to meet many, many needs like some of the file services platforms do. It's a backup and it does its job.

I think it was mostly a price win, really, between the two. The pricing that was offered in conjunction with a lot of other purchases we've made with HP made it a very attractive offer, and the technology behind it was solid and passed all of our testing needs. It just seemed like a logical fit for us. Sure, with StoreOnce we were actually seeing quite a bit of dedupe benefit where we weren't getting any dedupe before, so we're actually getting reports generated where we can see the dedupe ratios for various datasets that we're actually backing up. Basically the net effect is that we're using a lot less space to do our backups, and it gives us the versatility to spin off certain backups to tape, or to replicate off-site or to just let age out in the system and get overwritten.