StoreOnce

General guidelines

Please always check the general deduplication appliances section as the best practices listed there also apply to HPE StoreOnce.

Integrated vs Non-integrated

Always use HPE StoreOnce Catalyst as it provides many performance benefits over the non-integrated type. These include, but are not limited to:

Much faster Synthetic Full Backups.
Improved performance for Instant Recovery, SureBackup, On-Demand Sandbox, File- and Item-level recovery.
Improved replication between two HPE StoreOnce backup repositories (Catalyst Copy).
Immutability support, even for Catalyst Copy Jobs.
Cloud Bank Storage support.

More details on these supported features are available on our Veeam Help Center.

Reference Configuration

For extensive best practices on HPE StoreOnce implementation, please refer to the HPE Reference Configuration for Veeam Backup & Replication version 12 with HPE StoreOnce and HPE StoreEver.

Performance

Single stream vs multiple streams

While backup performance for single stream is roughly 30% faster with source side deduplication disabled (“High Bandwidth” mode), it’s recommended to keep it enabled as it’s possible to achieve a high throughput by concurrently processing more than 10 streams (eg. more than 10 VMs).

To use multiple streams, make sure to use Per-Machine Backup Files by ticking the checkbox under the Advanced Repository Settings.

This option is checked by default in case the device is part of a SOBR Performance Tier.

Proxy/Gateway servers

To get the best level of performance, it’s best to have multiple proxy/gateway servers in order to distribute the load and avoid saturating the maximum number of connections allowed from a single host. The HPE StoreOnce Catalyst agent:

is embedded into the Veeam Data Mover
must be installed on a 64-bit Microsoft Windows version

Keep this in mind when deciding on the operating system for the Veeam proxy servers. When a proxy server run Windows, the gateway server (and Catalyst agent) can be combined onto the same machine. When proxy servers run Linux, dedicated Windows gateway servers must be used. It is not required to have a 1:1 relationship and one can have many Linux proxy servers and just a few Windows gateway servers.

Catalyst over FC vs. Ethernet single stream performance

It has been verified that single stream backups on Catalyst over FibreChannel (FC) are slower than Ethernet, by approximately 30-40%. While during backup operation it’s not an issue as you can have multiple streams to have the optimal level of performance, this negatively affects mount-based restores such as File- and Item-level Recovery (FLR) as they are limited to a single stream’s performance.

If you still want to use FC, then you can also do that with multiple gateway servers.