HP StoreOnce Catalyst is an enterprise-wide deduplication algorithm which is used in HP StoreOnce appliances, HP StoreOnce VSA and HP Data Protector. With StoreOnce Catalyst, deduplicated data can be moved between Catalyst capable devices without the need to rehydrate the data. Think about the backup in your remote location. You can move the deduplicated data to your central StoreOnce appliance in your HQ without rehydrating the data. This saves bandwidth and time.

Yesterday I received the following tweet: @vMario156 Yes, this was stated in an older version of the best practice guide. 1 IO is currently best practice, not only for 3PAR. — Patrick Terlisten (@PTerlisten) June 5, 2014 Later Craig Kilborn joined the conversation and I decided to clarify this 100 or 1 IOPS myth the next morning. @Craig_Kilborn @vMario156 I check this tomorrow at the office. I don't know why this was changed, but it has changed from 100 to 1 IO.

Disclaimer: I use a NFR license that was provided to me as a vExpert by code4ward free of charge. I have searched for a relatively long time for a solution to manage multiple remote connections, like RDP, VNC or SSH. I tried different free tools, but none of them fulfilled my requirements, which are quite simple: Manage different connections & credentials. First I’ve tried Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager, which was quite good.

One of the tasks that I finish before I present the first Virtual Volumes (VV) to hosts is to discuss the need of a custom SATP claimrule with the customer. Requirement for a custom claimrule is usually, that the active and optimized path should be switched after each IO and not after 1000 IOs. Duncan Epping wrote a nice blog post some years ago. I recommend to read it. Some basics The Storage Array Type Plug-In (SATP) is responsable for array-specific operations, like health monitoring of physical paths, reporting of path state changes and path failover.

HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization (AO) enables autonomic storage tiering on HP 3PAR storage arrays. With this feature the HP 3PAR storage system analyzes IO and then migrates regions of 128 MB between different storage tiers. Frequently accessed regions of volumes are moved to higher tiers, less frequently accessed regions are shifted to lower tiers. I often talk with customers about AO and I know that this feature is sometimes misunderstood and misconfigured.

The last two days I had a lot of trouble with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDP), or to use the older wording, terminal services. To be honest: Terminal servers are not really my specialty, and actually I was at the customer to help him with some vSphere related changes. But because I was there, I was asked to throw a closer look at some problems with their Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 based terminal server farm.

Some weeks ago, Frank Denneman wrote a short blog post about accessing his Supermicro IPMI with SSH. He used this access to power on his lab servers.I don’t use Supermicro boards in my lab, but I have four HP ProLiants with iLO and iLO has a also a SSH interface. This way to power on my servers seemed very practical, especially because the iLO web interface isn’t the fastest. But I wanted it a bit more automated, so I decided to use Plink to send commands via SSH.

HP StoreOnce Appliances or VSA offers three different types of backup destinations: Virtual Tape Library (VTL) NAS (CIFS or NFS) StoreOnce Catalyst If you use Veeam Backup & Replication, the NAS feature is possibly worth a try. Using the NAS feature, the StoreOnce appliance or VSA offers a CIFS or NFS share, which can be used as a backup destionation. Today I want to show you how you can use a NAS share of a StoreOnce VSA with Veeam Backup & Replication.

In part I of this series I showed you the download and the deployment of the HP StoreOnce VSA. Part II showed you the configuration of two libraries and the connection of the backup server to this two tape libraries. Part III of this series covers the configuration of devices and meda pools in HP Data Protector 8.1. This article will not show the installation of HP Data Protector 8.1.

The HP StoreOnce VSA is a virtual storage appliance, that is designed for backups between 1 TB and 10 TB and it’s based on HPs StoreOnce technology. I wrote a short overview about the HP StoreOnce VSA some weeks ago. Take a look at this blog posting if you are not familiar with HP StoreOnce VSA. This article is focuses on the deployment of the HP StoreOnce VSA in a VMware vSphere environment.