One of the cool new features in Veeam 9.0 (for the full list check the v9.0 announcement) is the support for StoreOnce Catalyst. Catalyst was already supported by some other vendors but Veeam was on my personal list of wanted features since log. So now it is finally there.
Catalyst integration provides superior source-side data deduplication to enhance backup performance, reduce backup costs and simplify backup environments. HPE and Veeam allowed me to be in the beta-testing group and so I tested this feature extensively since quite some time. Must say: looks good! Much better performance in backup and restore (4VM backup was 21 minutes now 14…) and easier to configure.
Without Catalyst support you needed to create a network share inside StoreOnce and connect to it. Now with Catalyst you just connect to the Catalyst Store… It will recognize it and set all preferred parameters for you:
The last picture shows my VSA-based StoreOnce device with a NAS share and a Catalyst store in parallel…
Some other nice features are:
– Up to 50% faster backup performance over low bandwidth links with advanced source-side deduplication by HPE StoreOnce Catalyst
– 10x faster in-place synthetic full-backup file creation and transformation for dramatically shorter backup windows
– FC connectivity enables LAN-free backup to HPE StoreOnce
– Built-in file management for HPE StoreOnce Catalyst stores enables managing and storing Veeam backups and regular files manually
To be able to use this Catalyst integration, you will need HPE StoreOnce 3.13.1 firmware or later, and a Catalyst license on the StoreOnce device. Let it be clear that this is on the physical and virtual VSA-based StoreOnce devices. Don’t know how to update your firmware on StoreOnce, check out the How To section if this website for all details.
By the way the GUI also changed… 
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