HP Data Protector

This is a follow-up to an earlier blog post about Federated Catalyst, a new feature in HP StoreOnce D2D backup devices.  See the earlier post for more information about Federated Catalyst. 

Without backup software to actually use Federated Catalyst, the technology itself doesn’t do much good, so my first question is when would Data Protector support Federated Catalyst.   The good news is that Data Protector 8 and 9 will both support Federated Catalyst when it becomes generally available with the new 3.11 StoreOnce firmware.

I confirmed with Data Protector staff that Data Protector 9, which was recently announced and soon to be launched, will support Federated Catalyst at launch and Data Protector 8 is getting support via a patch.  Users already running Data Protector 8.12 should already have support delivered for their existing backup environment.

Data Protector 9 was announced on May 14, during Microsoft TechEd, with a laun
ch timeframe scheduled roughly one month afterwards.  The new version of Data Protector features enhancements for vSphere backups, including a new method to perform granular file recovery directly from full VMDK backups.

The Data Protector team also announced a new product called Backup Navigator on May 14.  Backup Navigator is a dashboard and analytics platform for backup.  The intent of Backup Navigator is to observe and learn how backup is running in Data Protector so that in future releases it can predict and make recommendations to improve backups and then in a third phase, it will be able to fully automate backup scheduling and operations.

As a Data Protector customer, support for Federated Catalyst should allow for easier administration and fewer required Catalyst stores in a backup environment.  It is also welcome news that both the HP Storage and HP Autonomy Data Protector teams timed the release together in both products.

Disclaimer:  HP invited me to HP Discover as a blogger and covered my expenses to attend the event.  I also spoke at a session during the event.  As always, the views and opinions stated on this blog are my own.  HP was given no editorial control over content or topics for my posts.