The new version of HPE’s StoreOnce hybrid backup appliance remakes pretty much everything, from new hardware, to a new software stack and GUI, to significant changes to the go-to-market.
The HPE StoreOnce family
Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE] is announcing a refresh of their hybrid cloud data protection and copy data management solutions within their storage portfolio. The major announcement is a complete overhaul of their HPE StoreOnce hybrid backup appliance portfolio. HPE is also announcing a new version of their RMC software, an extension of their partnership with Commvault around StoreOnce, and new capabilities arising from these announcements for HPE GreenLake.
“This is a very significant announcement for us,” said Neil Flemming, Product Manager for StoreOnce at HPE. “We are completely refreshing the StoreOnce portfolio, changing both the hardware, and the entire software stack.”
It starts with a brand new look. The old user interface, which dated from 2011, has been completely modernized.
“We have a new HTML5-based GUI, which looks much more like the 3PAR GUI,” Flemming said. “It has more workflow guidance and wizards, and so is much more intuitive as a result.”
Pretty much everything behind the interface has been reworked as well.
“We have refreshed the file system and the OS as well and added support for next-generation fabrics,” Flemming indicated. “Everything is brand new, and optimized for performance. The drives are now much larger capacity. We used to have a range of 5.5 TB to 864 TB usable storage before dedupe. Now it is 15.5 TB to 1.7 PB. With our Cloud Bank Storage, that adds another 3.5 PB in the cloud at the high end to the 1.7 PB local – and that’s before the dedupe, at a ratio of 20:1.”
HPE has also significantly beefed up the Virtual Storage Appliance [VSA] software-defined version of this product.
“We have invested a lot of time and effort in the VSA software-defined version,” Flemming said. “Previously, it topped out at 50 TB and was a standalone product. Now it has grown up into the enterprise, so it now scales to 500 TB and has a PB of Cloud Bank attached to that. It is much, much larger.”
Flemming described a new Federated Management feature as extremely significant in increasing StoreOnce’s scalability.
“It creates a federated domain of StoreOnce appliances, where you can now manage up to 100 StoreOnce appliances as a single system,” he said. “You can now do the same with the VSA – manage up to 100 appliances from single pane of glass. During our early access period, with all the improvements we have made, the strongest feedback has been this Federated Management feature and how it changes the way that you manage.”
Several other changes to how StoreOnce goes to market will be of great interest to the HPE channel.
“We are moving from a licensed-based version for features to all-inclusive licensing with this version,” Flemming said. “It’s much simpler for both customers and partners.”
A new tool for Cloud Bank has been made available to partners, that allows anyone to qualify within four hours so that they can use Cloud Bank.
“That is opening up opportunities among solution providers that we didn’t even know existed,” Flemming said.
A new free licensed server for VSA should be of interest to service provider partners.
“Service providers don’t want to buy VSA up front,” Flemming said. “This lets them stand up a backup-as-a-service, and build up an on-demand service as needed . We will also be looking to tie this into the HPE GreenLake consumption-based model, so they just get billed as they consume. This will help with both CSPs and resellers being able to offer personalized local services, which is their big differentiator against the big clouds. Look for further developments here in 2019.”
While the next-generation of StoreOnce is the big news here, HPE also made other enhancements to the data protection portfolio.
“HPE RMC [Recovery Manager Central] 6.0 now extends integrated data protection and copy data management to HPE Nimble Storage.
“We had already integrated Nimble’s predictive InfoSight capabilities with RMC, but this now fully integrates RMC with Nimble, so that it provides Nimble with faster backup and recovery,” Flemming said. This new version of RMC will be available in December.
HPE also announced a major extension of their partnership with Commvault, between HPE StoreOnce and Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery, to provide faster backups to the cloud which cost less.
“Commvault has many partnerships, but this is the first time that they have integrated into a secondary storage technology,“ Flemming said. “It is part of a deeper go-to-market relationship with Commvault, which will see a lot of joint marketing around using StoreOnce and Commvault together. Commvault is also available as part of HPE GreenLake.” The new Commvault integration with HPE StoreOnce is available now.
Finally, while the HPE GreenLake consumption-based service offered through HPE Pointnext was formerly pretty much a direct play, HPE largely opened it up to partners earlier this year. HPE GreenLake Backup has now been enhanced with both the next generation HPE StoreOnce and the new Commvault integration. New advisory and professional HPE services for Azure Hybrid cloud were also announced.
