Deduplicating backup appliances have revolutionized backup. They work with most backup software, increase backup success rates, shorten backup windows, reduce backup storage footprints and help centralize data protection. But these appliances sometimes exceed the budgets and capabilities of remote and branch offices (ROBOs), small and midsized businesses (SMBs) and service providers to install and support them. The HP StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) brings deduplication to these size offices in a new virtual form factor that better fits their specific needs.
On the Outside Looking in at Deduplicating Backup Appliances
The purpose built backup appliance (PPBA) market continues to blossom as the analyst firm IDC found that PBBA total sales exceeded $2.75 billion dollars in 2012. This represented nearly a 17% increase in investment in PBBAs year over year (YoY) with the total amount of PBBA capacity shipped increasing by nearly 43% over that same time period.
Deduplicating backup appliances contribute the most to these PBBA revenues. They are easy to deploy, solve many existing backup issues and reduce the reliance that organizations have on tape as their primary backup target. Despite their appeal many ROBOs, s(SMBs) and even service providers are still left on the outside looking in at this phenomenon.
Two particular challenges that these organizations face when deploying a deduplicating backup appliance include:
- Limited budget. Deduplicating backup appliances start at around $10,000 which may represent more of their IT budget than they are prepared to invest in such a solution.
- No IT staff onsite. Many of these offices have no IT staff so the responsibility of managing the appliance falls to someone who is neither in IT nor has any desire to be.
Aggravating the challenge of deploying a physical deduplicating backup appliance is the growing number of small offices that are virtualized. A SpiceWorks’ State of SMB IT 2H 2012 study found that 65% of all SMBs already use virtualization with that number expected to swell to 79% by the end of the 1H of 2013. As these size organizations virtualize the last thing they want to do is introduce a physical backup target into their newly virtualized environment.
HP Takes Deduplication Virtual with StoreOnce VSA
To better align with this rapid uptick of virtualization in ROBOs, service providers and SMBs while still meeting their budgets and delivering the benefits of a deduplicating backup appliance, HP has taken its physical StoneOnce deduplicating backup appliance virtual. The StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) capitalizes on the widespread availability of VMware vSphere in these environments by making its StoreOnce deduplicating backup appliance available as a virtual appliance.
Deployed using the VMware open virtual appliance (OVA) standard, SMBs may manually deploy the StoreOnce VSA as a virtual machine (VM) on individual VMware ESXi servers. However service providers and large enterprises will likely find either VMware vCenter or the HP StoreOnce Enterprise Manager (SEM) a better option as it enables them to centrally deploy and manage StoreOnce VSAs.
Using HP SEM, they can also do trend analysis to monitor capacity utilization, replication uptimes, deduplication ratios and even capacity planning and forecasting. This approach expedites and simplifies the deployment of StoreOnce VSAs and then enables these organizations to effectively manage the StoreOnce VSAs once they have them in place.
The StoreOnce VSA’s Four-Fold Benefits
By virtualizing the physical StoreOnce appliance, the StoreOnce VSA offers the following four key benefits to these organizations:
1. Affordable. The StoreOnce VSA minimizes and/or eliminates a number of costs normally associated with physical deduplicating backup appliances. It eliminates the upfront hardware costs associated with their deployment as well as minimize the need for future onsite support. It also eliminates the need to run power to a physical appliance as well as ongoing power costs.
2. Universal backup target. Once installed, the StoreOnce VSA may be presented as a storage target to whatever backup software is in use at the sites helping to minimize disruption to the existing environment.
3. Technology continuity. The StoreOnce VSA uses the same deduplication and replication technologies as are found on the physical StoreOnce deduplicating backup appliance. This commonality in deduplication and replication technologies benefits large enterprises with ROBOS and service providers that need to move deduplicated backup data either offsite for disaster recovery or to a central site where a physical StoreOnce appliance resides.
By both deduplicating and replicating data using the same algorithms, physical and virtual appliances can exchange data without needing to first reconstruct or rehydrate it. This eliminates the overhead associated with this process on both physical and virtual appliances. This also makes efficient use of the available network bandwidth between sites when data is replicated since only deduplicated data is moved.
4. Scalable. Most SMB-focused deduplicating appliances have only a couple of terabytes (TBs) of raw storage capacity. The StoreOnce VSA scales to protect up to 10 TBs of capacity for a licensing fee of $3,500.
A Winning Strategy for ROBOs and Service Providers
The StoreOnce VSA offers the levels of simplicity and cost-savings that are simply too much for ROBOs, and service providers to ignore especially in light of how virtualized their environments have become. They all benefit from its faster installs, the flexibility to keep their existing backup software and it eliminates the need to install and maintain a physical backup appliance at remote and client offices.
Large organizations with ROBOs and service providers reap a number of benefits beyond what even SMBs will realize. Using the StoreOnce VSA, they can:
- Non-disruptively centralize their backup data. Many ROBOs and small offices use their own backup software that is different than what the main corporate office uses or the service provider may offer. By deploying StoreOnce VSAs, large organizations and service providers avoid concerns about trying to deliver and configure a backup software solution that protects all of an organization’s applications. Instead they only need to deploy a StoreOnce VSA and then charge the office (if appropriate) based upon the amount of data that they actually backup. Using this technique ROBOs and small businesses can continue to use their existing backup software while non-disruptively centralizing the management of their backup data.
- Concurrently replicate multiple backup streams. Large organizations and service providers may have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of different offices from which they need to replicate data back to their main site. Using StoreOnce VSAs at these offices and then a larger physical StoreOnce appliance at their main data center, they may concurrently fan-in up to 384 backup streams back to the main site.
HP StoreOnce VSA Puts ROBOs, Service Providers and SMBs on the Inside Track to Deduplication
Deduplicating backup appl
iances have fundamentally chan
ged corporate backup processes but until now those who can most benefit from them have been on the outside looking in. No more. Using the HP StoreOnce VSA, ROBOs, service providers and SMBs alike gain access to the same benefits that physical deduplicating backup appliances offer.
The HP StoreOnce VSA delivers all of these features in a virtual appliance at a more affordable price point while requiring less time to setup and configure. More importantly, by deploying the StoreOnce VSA these organizations finally get to partake in the revolution in backup that is going on that is making backup more predictable and recoveries more reliable.