HPE Announces New Features and Integration for Its StoreOnce

As HPE moves from the current StoreOnce data protection appliances, based on Gen 9 ProLiant servers, to latest Gen 10 hardware, the vendor announced enhancements to the underlying software that improve economics, scalability and performance.

HPE also announced integration with Commvault for secondary storage; the extension of HPE Recovery Manager Central (RMC) 6.0 to Nimble Storage; and that HPE GreenLake Backup is enhanced with StoreOnce and the Commvault software integration.

The next-generation HPE StoreOnce, which demonstrates the vendor’s direction in its software-defined storage offering, is sold as a virtual machine or as the StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). According to Neil Fleming, worldwide product manager for the StoreOnce portfolio, the local capacity has been increased by 10X, from 50 TB of local capacity in each VSE to 500 TB. Users can attach up to a petabyte of Cloud Bank Storage, a 30X improvement to the previous generation.

Next-generation StoreOnce with Cloud Bank Storage improves the performance and agility of hybrid cloud data protection for environments including Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure by copying only unique data to the cloud and stores encrypted, self-describing backup data for simple cloud disaster recovery, according to the vendor.

The new Federated Management feature works across StoreOnce hardware and VSA. It enables users to create a federated management domain for up to 100 instances of appliances or VSAs and manage all of them as a single instance from a single pane of glass.

With the new generation of hardware, HPE has a new software stack as well with a file system and a HTML5 GUI that make it look more like the 3PAR GUI.

HPE also announced a new licensing server that can be loaded with capacity to tap on an as needed basis. “This is really great for service providers in the way they manage cash flow and manage their services,” said Fleming.

Managed service providers can also use the new licensing server in VSA to offer backup as a service (BUaaS), he added.

Regarding the Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery software integration with HPE StoreOnce provides seamless backup to the cloud, Fleming noted, “This is our first and only deep integration with a secondary storage vendor.”

“This announcement further strengthens the partnership between Commvault and HPE, providing our mutual customers with a simple, efficient, fast and secure hybrid cloud data protection solution,” said Owen Taraniuk, head of worldwide partnerships and market development at Commvault.

HPE GreenLake Backup will be enhanced with the next-generation HPE StoreOnce and the new Commvault integration.

Fleming told us to expect to see two reference architecture published soon, one for using Commvault with StoreOnce and another for using Commvault Hyperscale and HPE’s Apollo storage line.

HPE has a December timeframe for delivering RMC 6.0 for Nimble storage for efficient and fast copy management of data between Nimble and StoreOnce and CloudBank.

“We have a tool for CloudBank that allows anyone to quality any cloud within four hours, which we see as a huge opportunity for partners who want to stand up their own cloud and qualify it with CloudBank to offer a CloudBank service,” said Fleming.