HPE StoreOnce is a deduplication storage system providing efficient data compression and deduplication capability and suitable for data backup and long-term retention. HPE StoreOnce can be also be integrated with major backup vendors as the backup target storage.

This post is a quick introduction and demonstration of the HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Store for quick reference.

What is Catalyst?

Fundamentally, Catalyst is a backup protocol developed by HPE that is optimized for disk-based data protection. Data protection applications can use Catalyst to store, replicate, and archive customer data to Catalyst Store created in HPE StoreOnce.

Why use Catalyst?

There are a few good reasons to consider using StoreOnce Catalyst.

• Catalyst is a HPE patterned protocol, which means it could be more secure then public protocol and provide a higher level of protection of ransomware attack.
• Catalyst provide both source-side deduplication and target-side deduplication options to fit different scenarios.
• Catalyst support Catalyst Copy, which means you can copy the backup data from one Catalyst Store to another in different locations in a secured way.
• Data Encryption is licensed feature and can be enabled by customer’s choice.

How Catalyst Works?

Based on HPE StoreOnce public technical document, to utilize the Catalyst, the data protection application needs to have Catalyst plug-in installed.  The Catalyst API will translate the application commands and send the “Catalyst Commands” and “Catalyst Data” to HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Store via Catalyst Plug-in.

Some applications already have Catalyst plugin built-in without installation, for example, Veeam and SimpliVity.

How to replicate Catalyst backup to Cloud?

The answer is simple, HPE StoreOnce have a cloud edition in Azure Marketplace (StoreOnce VSA). The StoreOnce VSA is capable of Catalyst Copy between physical StoreOnce and other StoreOnce VSA. Therefore, it is easy to build up cascaded or fan-out backup copies by using Catalyst Copy.

The configuration of Catalyst Store is shown as below:

• Login to StoreOnce, navigate to “Data Services”, Click the “…” on right up corner, select “Create Store”.

• In Pop-up “Create Store” screen, type the Catalyst Store Name. There are two more settings for “Security Settings” and “Advanced Settings”.

• In “Security Settings”, you can select “Store Encryption”, “Data Immutable” and “Client Password Policy”.

• In “Advanced Settings”, you can select “Transfer Policy”, “Session History” and “Quota”.  The “Transfer Policy” is an important setting as it determines where the duplication will happen. For “Low bandwidth” policy, the deduplication will happen on source side and the deduplicated backup data will be sent from Catalyst agent to Catalyst Store via network. On the other side, in “High Bandwidth” policy, the backup data will be entirely sent to Catalyst Store and the deduplication will happened inside StoreOnce.

• The last step is to configure the “Client Access”.  This provides a secure access method to allow only a certain number of server clients to access Catalyst Store instead of public access.

• The Catalyst Store is ready to use.

The content of this post is based on the HPE public document and personal field experiences. For more details, please reference HPE documentations.