HP Claims Record-Setting Backup Speeds

The Best of Interop 2012

HP claims its new backup systems, introduced Monday at HP Discover, can back up data at up to 100 terabytes (TB) per hour and recover data at up to 40 TB per hour on a single system, rates that the company said are substantially faster than those offered by competitors' products. HP said these are the first backup and recovery systems to offer these speeds.

The company also introduced enhancements to its data protection software, deduplication appliances, its HP 3PAR storage systems, which allow the systems to become more flexible and scalable.

HP launched a new deduplication appliance, the HP StoreOnce B6200 backup system, and new software, HP StoreOnce Catalyst, which enables the Data Protector software to control deduplication and data movement. In addition, StoreOnce Catalyst offloads processing from the StoreOnce target appliance, allows deduplication to take place in different locations while still allowing centralized backups.

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With StoreOnce Catalyst, a customer can deduplicate data at the application source, backup server, or target appliance and enable data movement without first rehydrating the data. Remote office data can be deduplicated and replicated centrally as well as backed up locally without additional branch office hardware. Finally, Catalyst enables multi-site replication.

The B6200 is a federated or single deduplication appliance that works in combination with HP's Data Protector data protection and recovery software to backup data for business large and small. HP said the B6200 with Catalyst can backup data three times faster than EMC's Data Domain 990 and recovery data five times faster than the Data Domain appliance.

The company also introduced a version of its data protection and recovery software, Data Protector, which has been expanded to handle compliance and retention environments. Data Protector 7.1 has been integrated with HP Autonomy IDOL 10 for what HP calls meaning-based data protection. This integration means that data of all types can be searched by topic and context and recovered. It also means that single Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint or VMware items can be restored, and that customers can meet legal and regulatory compliance by searching on data to find and recover by meaning.

Further, HP announced a one-tier flat network. HP's Virtual Connect Direct-Attach Fibre Channel Storage for 3PAR allows an HP 3PAR array to attach to servers directly without a SAN switch or fabric interconnect layer. In this configuration, as many as 38 BladeSystem enclosures, 768 ProLiant Gen8 blade servers, and more than 20,000 virtual machines can be attached to a single 3PAR P10000 system.

HP also introduced new versions of its Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) that offer increased scalability and performance. The P6350 contains as much as 8 GB of cache and has an 800-TB capacity. The P6550 has 16 GB of cache and a 1.2-PB capacity.

Finally, the company rolled out a new IBRIX scale-out NAS node--the X9730 can grow from 2 to 16 nodes and supports 2 TB and 3 TB hard drives for a maximum capacity of 1.7 PBs.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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