Re Vincent,
With the StoreOnce software, I imagine I need to purchase addition licenses or/and hardware? Would it replace/be traded with/ the File Library licenses?
In fact, no, and there are no "File Library licenses". Actually, if you have Advanced Backup to Disk (AB2D) licenses that worked for a DFMF File Library in a virtual full backup scheme, you have more than enough to replace that with SO software. Same for the physical disk space. The Dedup really does magic there. For example, I had a customer up their local disk space and AB2D licensing from 4TB to 7TB so their virtual full cycle would last at least 7 days. After converting that to SO, they are now using 1.5TB and I bumped their backlog from 30 days to 8 weeks so as to at least make some use of the space (we also removed a lot of measures we had in place to prevent stuff from being backed up that's not absolutely needed, to safe space in the DFMF FL). So the problems aren't going to come from that vector. But be aware that rehydration performance will absolutely demand as many RAM and spindles as possible, as the copy to tape performance will be the new golden lamb you have to dance around. That's not that new either (DFMF used to fragment a lot), but it's a new quality.
In your experience, can we achieve similar outcome with that new solution?
The biggest issue will be that of how to deal with the requirement of daily fulls on tape for external vaulting or DR. That is really a hard problem, given synthetic fulls were invented exactly for this purpose. Virtual fulls and incremental forever was also invented to lighten the load on your source servers. If you can stand daily fulls at the source, that would be a solution - SO will happily digest them all and dedup them to mostly nothing (you will reach fantastic dedup ratios this way), but the overhead is enormous and the rehydration becomes even more of a factor. If you cannot do daily fulls at the source, you probably have to persist in your HP case until they provide you a true fix for consolidation. You can do consolidation on SO I've been told (when I tried to configure it with 6.21 I ran into a bug and just dumped the entire concept without looking back much, but that should have changed by now), but it has to work at least as well as it used to before one would rely on it again...
HTH,
Andre.