HPE StoreOnce Reviews

Our client is a government office. They use StoreOnce to store information about the weather as they specialize in meteorology data.

Most of our clients are medium-sized enterprises.

I think it's a good solution. The hardware is strong and all the equipment has a good infrastructure. Personally, I think it's the best storage product in HPE for small to medium-sized businesses.

HPE StoreOnce should come with a detailed installation guide. 

I have been using HPE StoreOnce for two weeks.

With StoreOnce, there are many different options for increasing the storage. I believe it's a good solution if a company needs more space for a reasonable price — it's easy to scale this solution.

The technical support is good. I used their technical support for assistance when I was trying to download the console management software — they resolved that problem in an hour or so. 

StoreOnce is very easy to install. No specialized software is required in the installation process. Deployment is also very easy.

The initial setup is not complex but it really depends on the type of server. For example, when you use a normal server, it requires a unique process to install the complete solution. With the StoreOnce server, you have to use another method to install the solution because it's very different. This server has its own software pre-installed in the equipment, so it's different than a normal server.

Overall, deployment took two days. One day to install the hardware, and another day to deploy the software.

Our client evaluated Dell, Lenovo, and Synology. Synology is a cheaper solution for storing data. However, our client was looking for reliable equipment with full-support — Synology doesn't come with support. With Dell and Lenovo, it was also complicated to obtain support in Ecuador. HPE provides the best support in Ecuador.

I would absolutely recommend HPE StoreOnce — it's a good product. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE StoreOnce a rating of ten.

The features my clients appreciate more is the deduplication ratios. It's amazing. That technology can put tons of TBs in a fewer space.

The benefits are clear. They need to store their backups in a single space with this feature of deduplication, compression. The administration is so easy for them and the integration with their backup application they are using, like Data Protector, are so transparent.

The licence procedures: There is a team for the deployment and there's a team for the licence, but they don't communicate with each other. That's an issue for us.

My customers don't have any issues, important issues, with StoreOnce.

It's not necessary to scale the smaller equipment, and we haven't had to scale the larger equipment as our customers aren't there yet.

HPE have better support - hardware and software - compared to the competition. They appreciate it so much. Their response time is so good.

Complex for a technician is not an issue because it's very clear. Putting the StoreOnce in production is transparent for a technician who has a sense of knowledge and basically operating systems knowledge too.

We start up the equipment and we need to put the licence number and the serial number of the equipment but I had a problem with that. It is not clear which serial number we need to use. I had a problem with a client who used one serial number but that serial number wasn't the correct one. We needed to open a case for re-licensing the equipment. It takes about two weeks to put in the licence. It's not OK for us, for the client. It's the only issue I have with the StoreOnce.

It provided us help at a time when we needed a lot of storage quickly. It provided us that storage and it was really easy to deploy. Needless to say, we were very happy with that.

We're actually not happy with StoreOnce because we had to delete our backups three times. HP support was unable to recover them. We can't even log in to fix the problem ourselves. There was no indicator or any type of system alert that we would not be able to recover the files. We only figured that out once we couldn't backup anymore. When we tried to do a restart, it was not accessible.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability improved as they released updates and patches for the software.

It's a good product to scale out because we can just buy more appliances and then we'll easily have more space.

Technical support is OK. When we determined that we couldn't recover the data in our StoreOnce, HP support said we should copy everything to another StoreOnce while fixing the defective one. We didn't have a spare StoreOnce, so this suggested fix was disappointing.

We used ArcServe GPT, but we didn't have enough space for traditional servers and ProLiant disks.

The initial setup was straightforward. That's the idea of the product -- straightforward to implement.

We wanted to restore the files we backed up, and on three occasions we were not able to, and this got us in a lot of trouble, so I don't think I will take this risk again. Use something else.

Using virtual tapes, we can accelerate the backup/recovery of our solutions.

The CIFS share service performance is really poor; it is a nightmare. Instead of CIFS we prefer to use NFS.

When presenting CIFS shares to Linux hosts and I tried copying a huge quantity of files, performance was so slow, terribly slow... This was not an issue when I used NFS. Fortunately, I'm not the only one with this problem: http://www.v-strange.de/index.php/hardware/14-cifs-performance-problem-on-hp-storeonce-systems. Fortunately, too, it seems to be a firmware matter. I'll be looking to solve that problem.

I have been using it for 14 months.

I have not encountered any deployment or scalability issues. The product is really stable.

Technical support is great! No problem; fast solutions.

Initial setup was so easy, really easy.

We implemented it through a vendor; it was a smooth deployment.

To be honest, the product is expensive to acquire and costs have been growing since then.

It is at the top of its class, in my experience.

It's a great product but it is really expensive. Expanding its capacities is sometimes more expensive than buying new storage.

The deduplication and the savings you get from that. We actually get a better performance with the source-side deduplication with catalyst store.

It sends less traffic over the network when you use the catalyst store, so it causes less congestion on the network.

Maybe when we do restores for Veeam, the way it has to re-hydrate all the deduplicated data, if there's a way to speed that up that would be a good feature, some kind of algorithm or something.

It's stable enough for our backup product. There's a couple of issues with the CIFS we were using with Veeam, but we're trying to use the catalyst stores now that Veeam 9 came out, and it seems to be working better so far, but we just started doing that like a month ago, so we're still in the testing phase.

It's good. You can scale out if you have the money and you can add a lot to it.

They've actually got really good tech support. If you have to do an upgrade, they do a remote session and they'll guide you through it.

We were using VLS, which was an HP product. It was basically a virtual tape library, and just basically straight to tape. They weren't performing well, and it was actually really slow.

That was before my time, so I'm not sure.

The only problems I ever saw was with the CIFs was the performance but like I said, we're trying to do the catalyst now. It's a required deduplication, and say your backup software doesn't do it or your backup software doesn't perform that great with deduplication, I'd look at StoreOnce, because it does all the deduplication on the backend.

We are the system integrators based in Qatar and this is one of the products that we provide to our customers as a backup solution. 

The primary use case is for data backup, mostly for virtualization infrastructure.

The most valuable features are the deduplication and compression capabilities. Also, in terms of performance and recovery, it has good capabilities.

It's a simplified product, more or less with plug-and-play capabilities. It has three flavors of integration being storage, NAS storage, and a backup system. These components are vital and with this product, it's like having three in one box.

It can be paired with the Veeam backup software.

Pricing could be reduced

The GUI and its user-friendliness have some room for improvement.

From a technical point of view, it's a stable solution.

HPE StoreOnce has the highest scalability in the market. It is very good compared to products such as Dell Data Domain.

I am satisfied with the technical support.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Price-wise, it comes with a high price tag when compared to other products.

HPE has CloudBank capabilities. For example, it has 1.7 petabytes of CloudBank storage. For anyone who is looking for a long-term archive, as well as a backup solution, this is the ideal product. It comes with a three-year warranty and it's stable when it comes to base start-up solutions.

This solution offers both on-premises and public cloud deployments. If the customer needs on-premises backup then it is capable of that, or if the customer requires long-term retention, for example, five years, or for ten years, then they can keep the data in an archive system such as cloud backup or cloud volumes.

Overall, it's a very good product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It's an on-premise deployment and can be scalable to public cloud.

The valuable feature is the ability to work with the Veeam software to reduce the backup windows.

The benefits are more capacity in the backup server and the ability to retain backups.

I would like to see better integration with Veeam software.

It demonstrates high stability and it can integrative with Veeam and other HPE products such as 3PAR.

The scalability is very high and you can get more space if you need to grow.

I have not used technical support.

We knew we needed to invest in this solution because we needed to fine-tune our backup windows.

We are not evaluating other companies.

When selecting a vendor, we look for reliability in the market, the capacity for growth, and how the company integrates their products.

I recommend this product because of the easy integration with Veeam and other backup products.

We just put two StoreOnce appliances in our data center. They provide me with everything in one box and I don't need to worry about other equipment.

We can focus on things more important than performing backups. It has everything we need and I think we've made a good decision.

We want to be able to use Resource Monitoring and Control (RMC), but that won't come until the next version of the StoreOnce software. Now we're using Data Protector.

It's been up and running now for four months and we haven't had any issues.

I just say I need X terabytes and I'm done. At the moment, we have around 150TB and we expect to grow because we're going more and more to video. We have four newspapers and an online presence with videos embedded in our stories.

We were using a very old backup platform with tapes and an older version of Data Protector. We upgraded Data Protector and bought StoreOnce.

I think you just have to experience it. You'll see that companies that use it have a good experience with it.