New HP StoreOnce Dedupe Technology: Restores As Fast As It Backs Up Data

The new dedupe technologies were introduced at HP's Discover conference, held this week in Las Vegas.

They included the introduction of a new version of the HP StoreOnce Catalyst dedupe software that gives its dedupe appliance, the B6200, backup and restore speeds of up to 40 TBs per hour.

[Related: HP's 3PAR Storage Connects To Blades Without SAN, Targeting Cisco, EMC Offerings ]

This compares to 28 TBs per hour for HP's previous top dedupe appliance, and it beats the performance of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC's new DD990 dedupe appliance, with its throughput of up to 31 TBs per hour, said Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing for HP storage.

"I point out the fact that the B6200's backup and restore speeds are the same," he said. "With most products, the restore speed is half the backup speed."

Furthermore, Palo Alto-based HP used the Discover conference to demonstrate the ability to dedupe data with a backup rate of up to 100 TBs per hour by offloading the dedupe computation from the StoreOnce appliance to either the backup server or the application server, Nunes said.

HP's Catalyst dedupe software is now also integrated into the backup console of the HP Data Protector software, as well as with Mountain View, Calif.-based Symantec's NetBackup console. It will also be integrated with Symantec's Backup Exec console, Nunes said. A software development kit is also available for other independent software vendors to make use of the technology as well, he said.

"With StoreOnce and Catalyst and Data Protector, we are allowing our partners to handle physical, virtual and cloud-based platforms," he said. "We're giving them a broader scope for their backup and recovery business. They can consult for customers' on-premise, cloud and dedupe backup and recovery."

The ability to integrate HP's Catalyst dedupe software with the HP Data Protector backup and recovery software means more opportunities for IT Partners, said Bill Cassidy, CTO of IT Partners, a Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider and HP partner.

NEXT: Opportunities For The Channel"We have a lot of customers who we have migrated to Data Protector, but we haven't had a lot of opportunity to talk to them about something new," IT Partners' Cassidy said. "But with the Catalyst integration, we can talk to them about new features and some great new services opportunities. Most Data Protector customers are not disk-to-disk backup customers. Now we can talk them about a great new solution to their pain. And backup is a major pain point."

It is also important for solution providers that the restore rate of deduped data is the same as the backup rate, Cassidy said.

"The restore rate has always been slower," he said. "If the recovery is slow, it doesn't matter how fast the backup was done. If the restore rate is the same as the ingest rate, that really appeals to customers."

The HP B6200 StoreOnce backup appliance, which can be configured with up to 48 TBs of capacity, is currently available with a starting list price of about $250,000.