Backing up takes time. How much time it takes to backup, is something that HP is now changing with some new enhancements to its StoreOnce Backup family of products.

At HP’s Discover conference in Las Vegas today the company announced that StoreOnce can do data recovery at rate of up to 40 Terabytes an hour. Performance is also getting a boost from new deduplication capabilities via improved software.

Craig Nunes, Vice President, Marketing at HP Storage, explained to InternetNews.com that the new performance benchmarks were achieved via a combination of items. Those items include a scale out architecture as well as an HP Labs technologies called Predictive Acceleration. What Predictive Acceleration does is it reduces memory and disk I/O needs.

Another component of the performance boost comes from HP’s Rapid Restore, which is a matching algorithm that relieves the deduplication overhead on restore. Going a step further is the HP StoreOnce Catalyst, which allows the deduplication processing to be offloaded from the StoreOnce appliance to the backup server and application server.

On the software side, the new HP Data Protector 7 software now gets a boost from HP’s Autonomy IDOL software to further improve the deduplication performance. John Gromala, Director, Product Marketing, Industry Standard Servers and Software, at HP explained to InternetNews.com that ‘rehydrated’ deduplicated information can often be a time consuming process. Deduplication is fundamentally about taking information and removing the duplicate bits.

What HP has done with Data Protector 7 is leverage the Autonomy IDOL solution so the system can have a more meaningful base of info in the way data is tagged before it gets dedupulicated. The general idea being, that with that info deduplication overall is more efficient.

Another way that storage efficiency overall is being improved is with HP’s flat SAN architectural approach. The new HP Virtual Connect for 3PAR with Flat SAN technology is all about have a direct attach SAN capability that allows HP to connect BladeSystems to 3Par storage.

Gromala noted that have a direct attach approach removes the need for extra tiers of infrastructure that can introduce more complexity, latency and cost.