Recent research by AMI-Partners, called "SMB Cloud & Storage Partner Opportunity", revealed that spending on cloud-based backup as a service offerings by SMEs is expected to grow over 14% globally between now and 2017.
Concurrently, the research showed that the two most commonly cited business initiatives impacting IT spending were cost reduction and risk management.
David Scott, senior VP and GM: Storage Division, HP, said this is an opportunity for service providers and enterprises to fundamentally change how they address the cost of data protection at small sites and in virtualised environments.
With this in mind, HP has released HP StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), which it calls a hardware-agnostic, software-defined storage solution deployed as a virtual machine on existing industry-standard server infrastructure.
Scott said this solution removes the need for dedicated hardware at small sites, works with multiple backup software products, and can be centrally managed using the same tools and processes across all locations and backup methodologies.
"The appliance reduces capital expense by up to 65% compared to dedicated backup appliances, and is the industry's most scalable deduplication virtual appliance."
The VSA runs the same software as the physical HP StoreOnce appliances, and as such, shares the same advanced data services, including cross-family replication, backup application integration for performance and control, and federated deduplication.
According to Scott, this gives customers the ability to maintain efficiency across the enterprise.
The addition of this appliance to HP's Converged Storage portfolio makes HP StoreOnce the only single deduplication technology that can be deployed in four locations - a target appliance, media server, application source and virtual machine, said Scott.
He said many SMEs are turning to cloud-based IT services to lower capital investment in on-site equipment. Service providers and channel partners servicing this segment have started delivering hosted backup and disaster recovery services to meet this demand.
"HP's StoreOnce VSA enables service providers to deliver data protection services at a lower cost to SME customers. Deploying HP StoreOnce VSA software at the customer site, and then backing up data to HP StoreOnce VSA at a central location, eliminates the need to purchase, deploy and manage dedicated hardware. This efficient multi-tenant capability offers new revenue opportunities to server providers, while leveraging their existing server farm investments."
The appliance also lowers costs by removing the need for dedicated backup hardware in small sites, and dropping space requirements by up to 50% and power costs by up to 70%.
"Based on innovative technology from HP Labs, the company's central research arm, HP StoreOnce solutions leverage the same algorithm for ubiquitous deduplication across application servers, backup servers, target hardware appliances and VSAs. This reduces management and allows data to be backed up and replicated between deployments in a deduplicated state to lower capacity and network costs."
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