HP's Federated Catalyst lets users combine backup systems

The latest vendor that wants to turn many backup components into one is Hewlett-Packard, which introduced HPHP StoreOnce Federated Catalyst at its Discover conference in Las Vegas on Monday. The new software lets enterprises take several HP StoreOnce 6500 backup appliances, each of which may have several backup stores within it, and manage them all as one virtual store of data. Later, HP will introduce it for the older StoreOnce 6200 line and may extend the technology to its software-based StoreOnce Virtual StorageStorage Appliance and let users extend the backup pool to cloud resources. Alles zu HP auf CIO.de Alles zu Storage auf CIO.de

That might make life easier for the IT department at BlueShore Financial, a financial institution in British Columbia, Canada, that uses the StoreOnce 6200.

"Right now it's a lot of manual work to manage all these individual Catalyst stores," said Ryan Burgess, manager of technical infrastructure at BlueShore. The company runs a lean IT shop with just 12 employees, none a storage specialist. Burgess is investigating Federated Catalyst as a potential time-saver and a way to spread data from various applications across all the nodes in a 6200. Right now, data streams from VMware and MicrosoftMicrosoft Exchange and SQL Server all have to go into their own data stores. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

"From what I understand and what I expect, it will be giving us that easier management, but also better utilization of the assets we have," Burgess said. That could help prevent one node from getting overloaded and forcing BlueShore to buy more hardware, he said.

StoreOnce Federated Catalyst is designed to do that work itself. The software lets IT managers pool the capacity of multiple storage nodes -- initially, four StoreOnce 6500 nodes -- to form what appears as one large data store. Within that pool, an enterprise can add new nodes and add capacity to existing nodes. The software also extends data deduplication across the whole store, so with 860TB of usable capacity and a 20-to-1 deduplication ratio, Federated Catalyst can encompass a total logical backup capacity of 17PB.