Hardware Videos

1.2 Petabytes Per Hour: Backup Has Never Been This Fast

HPE showcased a breakthrough in backup and recovery by pairing its all‑flash X1000 storage platform with a new Data Protection Accelerator (DPE) node. In a Raleigh lab the team wired three to four racks of gear—30 ESXi hosts, roughly 1,440 virtual machines, and multiple X1000 clusters—to stress‑test the solution, aiming to prove that backup can keep pace with modern data growth. The test demonstrated headline‑grabbing numbers: the accelerator cluster achieved 1.2 petabytes per hour, equivalent to about 300 TB per hour per DPE, and completed a full backup of the 1,440 VMs in roughly 38‑40 minutes. By offloading deduplication, encryption, and tagging to the DPE, the X1000 storage ceased to be the bottleneck, allowing linear performance scaling as additional accelerator nodes are added. Engineers highlighted that the DPE acts as a compute‑heavy front‑end, reducing the data volume that reaches the primary array. “Speed is the end‑to‑end story,” one speaker noted, emphasizing that the architecture not only accelerates ingest but also shortens recovery times—provided the network fabric can sustain multiple 25 Gbps links and downstream servers can read the data fast enough. The lab also uncovered operational challenges, such as the need to upgrade Ethernet fabrics and tune backup applications to exploit the newfound throughput. For enterprises wrestling with exploding data volumes—driven by AI model training, analytics, and compliance—this architecture promises to shrink backup windows dramatically, preserve service‑level agreements, and potentially repurpose the high‑performance storage for other workloads. However, realizing the full benefit will require coordinated upgrades across storage, networking, and application layers.