Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) unleashed several StoreOnce updates that essentially allow enterprises to store data once, then copy it to an all-flash on-premises array, and send it to a public cloud for archiving or disaster recovery .

“Secondary storage is certainly an area that has been hot lately,” said Patrick Osborne, VP & GM, Big Data and Secondary Storage at HPE. “We started off with all flash and now customers want to make their secondary storage useful — things like automation, reuse of data, test-dev workflow, continuous integration and continuous delivery. We’re bring a whole set of solutions to the market to help customers address those needs.”

Secondary storage encompasses file shares, archives, analytics, backups, unstructured content, and test and development data — essentially everything that’s not mission critical. As the sheer volume of data grows exponentially, scale-out storage systems (in both enterprise and cloud data centers) and software to help manage this data become increasingly important.

Gartner forecasts that more than 80 percent of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems by 2021, up from 30 percent in 2017.

StoreOnce is HPE’s scale-out data protection and backup system with deduplication. Enterprises can buy it as a standalone, physical device or as software-defined storage. The virtual storage appliance can run in any hypervisor or in a cloud.

Today, HPE launched its next-generation of StoreOnce portfolio with flash storage and data protection in on-premises data centers, and archive and disaster recovery in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public cloud.

Using public clouds for long-term backup data retention or disaster recovery tends to be cheaper than storing backup copies on premises. The new StoreOnce appliances use a feature called Cloud Bank Storage that stores data once, and then sends an encrypted copy of that data to AWS or Azure for cloud disaster recovery.

HPE previously integrated its 3PAR all-flash storage arrays with StoreOnce appliances, thus proving copy data management between primary (3PAR) and secondary (StoreOnce) storage systems. Now it’s extending that integration to its Nimble Storage portfolio, which also provides primary storage. It uses Recovery Manager Central (RMC) software to provide a converged snapshot, replication, and backup directly from HPE primary storage arrays to StoreOnce. The company claims the software delivers 23-times faster backup and 15-times faster recovery compared to traditional backup requirements.

Additionally, HPE extended its partnership with Commvault and now integrates Commvault Complete backup and recovery software with HPE StoreOnce. This also provides cloud backup.

“We’re able to essentially go from primary [storage] to secondary [storage] and then out to the cloud, and we can even do archiving in the cloud,” Osborne said, adding that HPE supports AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) for object storage as well as Amazon Glacier for rarely used or “cold” data. In Microsoft’s public cloud, it supports Azure Blob object storage as well as Azure Archive for less-used data. It costs less to store data in Glacier and Azure Archive, as opposed to S3 and Azure Blob.

The StoreOnce upgrades allow companies to move data between S3 and Glacier, or Azure Blob and Azure Archives. “So it gives you the lowest-cost retention layer for long-term storage of backup data in the cloud,” Osborne said.

And finally, with today’s update HPE extends its GreenLake pay-per-use billing model to the new StoreOnce systems with Commvault integration. “We are helping customers really get the advantages of elasticity of a cloud model from an economic perspective, and purchase backup as a service,” Osborne said.