HP?s annual product conclave?HP Discover 2012 ? held in Las Vegas last month, was lined with a series of its latest innovations, with HP StoreOnce, a backup product, garnering maximum limelight. Courtesy the huge amounts of data generated by the public and private sectors alike, India could be a perfect market for several of these products

Hewlett Packard, in its recent product conclave, HP Discover, held in Las Vegas last month, announced a host of products, from path breaking solutions in storage, to cloud based products, and mobile printing devices. And India, feels its management, with its huge volumes of data and protection needs, could be the perfect fit for its latest innovations.

The company has specifically made a lot of noise about its HP StoreOnce Backup Systems, with ?deduplication? solutions; as well as the HP StoreOnce Catalyst Software. It has gone so far as to state that the enhanced version of its back up system, StoreOnce B6200, is 2.5 times faster than the backup performance of EMC DD990, a storage product introduced recently by its close competitor EMC. ?Unlike competitive deduplication solutions, the HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup system can restore at 100 % of the native ingest rate enabling data to be restored in less time to minimize downtime,? Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Group, HP, said at the launch of the product.

The systems can back up data at upto 100 terabytes (TB) per hour and recover data at up to 40 TB per hour on a single system. HP claims that these are the first backup and recovery systems to offer these speeds. And it does this through what it calls ?deduplication 2.0? solutions.

Deduplication technologies help organisations deal with explosive data growth by making it economically feasible to protect and recover data using disk based backup systems as an alternative to tape. First-generation technologies, however, are fragmented, requiring different technologies for branch offices or to move data between data centers. In fact, when moving data between different deduplication silos, clients must ?rehydrate? the data?or add back in the duplicate data?before remote office data can be delivered to the data center or to long-term archival. This results in increased network bandwidth, idle and underutilised disk space, and added management overhead and costs. They also are unable to maintain local copies for fast recovery at a branch office unless they purchase additional hardware. HP addresses limitations of legacy data protection architectures through ?deduplication 2.0?; combining scale-out storage design with HP StoreOnce federated deduplication technology from HP Labs. ?Clients are struggling with complex, incompatible storage solutions that are costly, hard to manage, underutilised and built for the past. HP is transforming the storage industry with simplified and converged solutions that span from the midrange to the high end of the enterprise, enabling organisations to maximise the value from their information in the most efficient way possible,? Donatelli said.

The HP StoreOnce Catalyst software for HP StoreOnce Backup allows clients to deduplicate data on application servers or backup servers before it is transferred to a centralised HP StoreOnce Backup system. This approach, said HP, enables clients to optimise backup processes, eliminate wasted resources, reduce network bandwidth cost and improve backup throughput.

The 48TB HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup system has been priced starting at $250,000 (US), while HP StoreOnce Catalyst software is priced starting at $37,500.

According to HP, India has an intrinsic need for these due to huge volumes of data and norms around storage. ?Traditionally, the Indian market is a very server oriented market. Most of the storage that we buy is also attached to the servers. All of our new launches have a huge impact for us,? said Neelam Dhawan, managing director, HP India.

?Store-Once Deduplication is probably the most important of all for us. In India, amount of data is huge. If you can have deduplication here, you are reducing the amount of storage space needed by banks, telecom companies, and government projects. The data protection products also have a large market, since In India, we keep data for a minimum of seven years,? she added.

However the company was not able to comment on the actual size of the Indian opportunity. ?The total IT market is around $20 billion, out of which, $10 – $11 billion is PCs, printers and servers. Services again are $6 billion. Product is $3 – $4 billion. So it is hard to gauge the exact size for these,? Dhawan said.

The tide of transformation

* HP is transforming the storage industry with simplified and converged solutions that span from the midrange to the high end of the enterprise

* With deduplication technology, one can reduce the amount of storage space needed by banks, telecom companies, and government projects

* HP addresses limitations of legacy data protection architecture through ?deduplication 2.0?; combining scale-out storage design with HP StoreOnce federated deduplication technology from HP Labs

* The HP StoreOnce Catalyst software for HP StoreOnce Backup allows clients to deduplicate data on application servers or backup servers before it is transferred to a centralized HP StoreOnce Backup system. This approach enables clients to optimize backup processes, eliminate wasted resources, reduce network bandwidth cost and improve backup throughput