By Keith Millett | Nov 29, 2017 | Product of the Month

HPE StoreOnce – Insurance for Your Data

The Next Generation of Deduplication

Data protection: It’s a bit like liability, casualty, and other insurance—isn’t it? You don’t want to ever use your insurance, but it’s essential to have when problems arises. And the cost of data protection “insurance” is not just the cost of equipment and staffing. It also includes the degradation of your business operations when:

  • A backup window runs too long.
  • It takes too long to restore lost or damaged data.
  • Data at remote locations isn’t properly protected.
  • A regulatory auditor identifies some concerns.
  • A tape falls off the truck and ends up in the wrong hands.

A few years ago, two technologies emerged to dramatically improve the industry’s ability to protect data. The cost of disk drives came down, and deduplication technology was introduced.

Like any technology, you’d expect it to evolve over time. Hewlett Packard Enterprise launched the StoreOnce deduplication technology in 2010 to do just that. The result? The only Federated Deduplication solution on the market. This next generation deduplication technology addresses some of the issues inherent in existing deduplication solutions: performance, flexibility, and data management and solves customer’s business challenges by reducing cost, reducing risk, and eliminating complexity throughout the backup environment. Not only that, when moving from your legacy storage backup systems to StoreOnce, you can reduce the amount of your stored backup data by 95 percent guaranteed or Hewlett Packard Enterprise make up the difference with free disk capacity and support.

Deploy across multiple Hewlett Packard Enterprise platforms

HPE StoreOnce is built upon an HPE-developed single deduplication algorithm, which works across your company’s hardware and software platforms. In other words, you can deploy the StoreOnce deduplication engine across multiple Hewlett Packard Enterprise platforms,  including the HPE StoreOnce 6000, 5000, and 3000 series as well as the StoreOnce Virtual  storage Appliance (VSA), which is a virtual backup appliance. In addition, HPE Data Protector software contains the StoreOnce deduplication and Hewlett Packard Enterprise provides convergence of StoreOnce with its flagship primary storage HPE 3PAR StoreServ with Recovery Manager Central software to enable extremely fast, cost effective, and efficient protection of primary storage while being fully compatible with all of the StoreOnce Systems.

Address critical data protection problems
Hewlett Packard Enterprise was able to identify the most pressing data protection problems by drawing on its long history of helping customers protect their data. Through this experience, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has recognized four data protection challenges that affect nearly all of its customers in one way or another and lead to increased cost, risk and complexity in your backup environment.

Backup windows: With data typically growing around 40 percent per annum protecting more and more data in constant or even shrinking backup windows is a real challenge. Dealing with ever-increasing amounts of data with capacity and performance that can be added on an “as-you-need-it” basis is the answer. Most vendors offer a scale-up architecture, while HPE StoreOnce use a scale-out architecture. The result? A pay-as-you-grow model that eliminates forklift upgrades from the data center. This means you can add performance and capacity when you need it. No need to spend money on unneeded capacity up front. Today, HPE StoreOnce offers up to 1.7 PB of usable capacity and up to 184 TB/hr backup speed. So, if the competition needs eight hours to back up your data, Hewlett Packard Enterprise can do it in as little as 2.6 hours. That keeps your business operating an extra 5.4 hours each and every day. Imagine the value of having almost 3 extra months of operational time per year for your organization?

Restore performance: Investing in backup is futile if you can’t restore your data fast enough to meet your service-level agreements (SLAs). Most vendors still focus their designs only around backup, and most often their restore performance is so compromised that it’s not even mentioned in their data sheets. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is different. We provide Industry-leading restore speeds of up to 128 TB/hr with HPE StoreOnce.

Application protection: Backup used to be the domain of the backup administrator but recently the lines have blurred with application administrators taking over the role of protecting their applications. HPE Recovery Manager Central converges the protection of HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage arrays with HPE StoreOnce deduplication by providing Flat Backup capabilities and enabling snapshot data to be moved directly from the primary array to the backup array, where it is deduplicated and stored for as long as required. This capability provides extremely fast backup and restore speeds and cost effective protection of the array without the need of a backup application.

Remote office data protection: A large amount of valuable data resides at remote locations. Too often, it’s not adequately protected. HPE StoreOnce takes care of all this. You can reliably get a backup and a DR copy of data at any location without the need for onsite expertise. And it’s affordable.

Reducing management effort by up to 50 percent
Early deduplication solutions solved some very important problems, but they also introduced some new ones. For example, the backup application controlled the backup itself and the backup appliance controlled all data movement. That is, the backup application and the backup appliance required two data management tools. The result was more management overhead and complexity. With Federated Deduplication, the backup application controls both the backup of data and all data movement, reducing two management tools down to one.

Fitting into your environment

HPE StoreOnce are designed to work using all the popular backup applications, so you don’t need to rip and replace as you do with some of the competitive alternatives. If you do want to upgrade your current backup application, there are some compelling reasons to take a closer look at HPE Data Protector—it offers functionality that you just cannot get elsewhere. Here are two examples.

  1. HPE Data Protector uses the same StoreOnce deduplication algorithm. This enables it to share deduplicated data with HPE StoreOnce in a deduplicated state without rehydration.
  2. Data Protector supports context-based searching of backed-up data. This means you can recover files by what’s in them rather than by file name. One important application of this capability is eDiscovery. This is possible because Data Protector is powered by Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) platform, which provides a unique and fully featured data management solution.

What’s next?
Your company wouldn’t exist without property, liability, and other key insurance. Likewise, don’t unnecessarily put one of your most valuable assets, data, at risk. You never know when a disaster strikes, so allow us to understand your environment and propose a federated deduplication solution that improves your data protection and lowers your cost.

Just contact CTI,  your IT Consulting and Solutions Partner at info@webcti.com or 800-606-6060 to learn more.