Storeonce

One of my customers bought a very nice new backup solution, which consists of a

• HPE StoreOnce 5100 with ~ 144 TB usable capacity,
• and a new HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with Windows Server 2016

as new backup server. StoreOnce and backup server will be connected with 8 Gb Fibre-Channel and 10 GbE to the existing network and SAN. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 U3a is already in use, as well as VMware vSphere 6.5 Enterprise Plus. The backend storage is a HPE 3PAR 8200.

When taking a backup with Veeam Backup & Replication, a VM snapshot is created to get a consistent state of the VM. The snapshot is taken prior the backup, and it is removed after the successful backup of the VM. The snapshot grows during its lifetime, and you should keep in mind, that you need some free space in the datastore for snapshots. This can be a problem, especially in case of multiple VM backups at a time, and if the VMs share the same datastore.

The Virtual Environment Integration (VE Integration) provides protection of VMs in virtual server environments. It is used o integrate HPE Data Protector with various virtualization environments, currently VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. For Citrix XenServer is a script solution available. I will focus on VMware vSphere.

What is possible?

I took this table from the “HPE Data Protector 9.00 Integration Guide for Virtualization”.

Feature	VE Integration
Online backup	✓
Crash-consistent backup	✓
Application-consistent backup	✓
Granularity	vmdk, vmx
Full/ Incremental/ Differential	✓/ ✓/ ✓
Support for changed block tracking (CBT)	✓
Where does the Data Protector component need to be installed?	backup host
Extra licenses needed	1x On-Line Extension per ESXi host

As you can see, Data Protector offers all you need to create a crash-consistent backup of your VMs. HPE Data Protector relies on the VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection (formerly known as VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection or VADP). Data Protector has to use the same API as Veeam, CommVault Simpana or any other product that can be used to backup VMs in a VMware vSphere environment. Therefore, most software products offer the same features.

HPE Data Protector stores multiple backup objects on a single Catalyst store item. A backup object can be a volume, a mount point, a database or a virtual machine. You can have multiple backup objects per backup client. If your filesystem backup job has four backup clients, and each client has two volumes, the backup job will contain 8 backup objects. Another example is a single database of a Microsoft SQL or Oracle database server (instance).

Some days ago, I blogged about the new HP StoreOnce software release 3.13.0. This release included several fixes. One fix wasn’t mentioned by me, although it’s interesting.

• Fixed issue where Windows 2012 R2 built-in native backup was not supported with 3.12.x software (BZ 61232)

Windows Server Backup (WSB) is part of Windows Server since Windows Server 2008. WSB can create bare metal backups and recover those backups. The same applies to system state backups, file level backups, Hyper-V VMs, Exchange etc. Very handy for small environmens. Backup can be stored on disk or on a file share. With Server 2012, the file share must be SMB3 capable. So if it’s not a Windows file server, the NAS that offers the file share has to be SMB3 capable. This doesn’t apply to Windows Server 2008 (R2).

Since september 2015, the latest version of HP StoreOnce backup system software is available. The latest release 3.13.0 is available for HP StoreOnce VSA, 6500, B6200 multi-node and all single node systems running software version 3.x. This also applies to some D2D 2500, 4100 and 4300 single-node backup systems running software versions 2.x. Make sure that you take a look into customer notice c03729283 for details on performing the conversion.

This release comes with some nice enhancements, e.g.

While I was playing with my shiny, new HP StoreOnce VSA in my lab, I noticed a curious behavior. I created a NAS share for some tests with Veeam Backup & Replication. Creating a new share is nothing fancy. You can create a share in two ways:

• using the GUI, or
• using the CLI

So I created a new share:

When talking to SMB customers, most of them don’t want to talk about their backup strategy. It’s paradox: They know that data loss can ruin their business, but they don’t want to invest money into a fully tested recovery concept (I try to avoid the word “backup concept” - Recovery is the key). Because of tight budgets and lacking knowledge, many customers use traditional concepts in a virtualized world. This often ends  in traditional backup applications with agents deployed into guest OS, and backups that are written to tape (or worse: On USB disks). If you ask a customer “Why do you store your data on tape?”, only a few argue with costs per GB or performance. Most the customer argue with something like

A free StoreOnce VSA, like the well known 1 TB StoreVirtual VSA? That would be too cool to be real. But it is real! Since February, HP offers a free 1 TB version of their StoreOnce VSA. I totally missed this announcement, but thanks to Calvin Zito I noticed it today:

Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA http://t.co/71464n0iZp

— IT Godfather (@CalvinZito) April 19, 2015

The link leads to another blog post from Ashwin Shetty (Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA), in which he provides more information about the free 1 TB StoreOnce VSA.

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. Or think about source-side deduplication, which means that a server deduplicates the data during the backup and sends the deduplicated data to the backup device. This saves bandwidth and increases the performance (with the downside of more cpu load on the server…).