DataProtector + LiveVault

HP have three backup products: DataProtector, LiveVault and Connected. LiveVault and DataProtector overlap somewhat because they are both about backing up servers.

LiveVault is designed to be a cloud-enabled backup, with an on-site in-house cache as an extra. It has no option for backing up to tape.

HP DataProtector is designed for in-house backup to tape or to a deduplication store. You can set up a deduplication store on any cloud-hosted server and do very low bandwidth replication to it.

LiveVault can backup Windows or Linux, and it has integrations with SQL, Exchange, VMware and Hyper-V. HP DataProtector has all of these too, plus other integrations.

DataProtector can control LiveVault jobs too. But it's not obvious when it makes sense to use the LiveVault integration to do a backup instead of DataProtector.

Looking at the Australian pricing, here are the scenarios where a DataProtector customer will do better with LiveVault than with DataProtector.

1. You have some small branch offices or cloud-hosted servers with less than 25GB to backup and you don't have an Advanced Backup to Disk license for DataProtector. The smallest Advanced Backup to Disk licenses is for 1TB and even though the per-GB costs are lower they aren't 40 times cheaper.
2. You have some cloud-hosted servers in the HP Public Cloud or Amazon AWS and you don't want to use the network-to-network VPN options that Amazon and HPPC offer. You might even have servers in a DMZ where you can't open up port 9387 and 9388 to do a StoreOnce backup. It makes sense to use LiveVault because you will have better bandwidth from the LiveVault servers to your cloud servers than you would have from an in-house data centre.
3. You have a large number of small SQL server databases spread out over lots of computers. With DataProtector you would be paying for an integration license for each SQL server; with LiveVault you only pay for the volume of data.
4. You have a large numbers of small MS-Exchange, VMware or Hyper-V servers. It's the same situation as for SQL server, but I don't think I've ever seen any site where this any of these are small enough.
5. A pair of small TurboRestore appliances spread across two data-centres can sometimes work out more cost-effective than StoreOnce software stores, but it only seems to work out for a few particular sizes. As far as I can tell it only works out for almost precisely 8TB or 12TB.

What else are you using the LiveVault integration for?


Greg Baker is an independent consultant working on HP DataProtector, LiveVault and many other technologies. See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector.