1.2 Petabytes Per Hour: Backup Has Never Been This Fast
We traveled to HPE's lab in Raleigh, North Carolina to stress test the Data Protection Accelerator Node (DPAN) paired with the Alletra Storage MP X10000, a flash-native, scale-out object storage platform. The goal was simple: find out how fast modern backup can actually go when the storage target is no longer the bottleneck.
The test environment included 30 ESXi hosts, 1,440 VMs, four DPANs, and an 8-node X10000 cluster across roughly three and a half racks of gear. HPE didn't just talk numbers on paper, they built the environment and let us push it.
In our focused three-server validation, a single DPAN completed a full backup of 144 VMs (27.36 TB) in 26 minutes at 17.54 GB/s. Scaling to seven servers in the "hero configuration," a single DPAN hit 83.83 GB/s (301.7 TB/hr) across 336 VMs in just 13 minutes, and still hadn't reached its ceiling. The constraint shifted to backup application orchestration, not storage. A separate Oracle RMAN test showed a 100 TB database backup completing in 2.4 hours with DPAN vs. 4.3 hours direct-to-X10000, a 1.79x throughput improvement.
Three key infrastructure takeaways emerged: backup applications aren't tuned for this level of throughput, network fabrics need to match (multiple bonded 25 GbE links, not legacy 10 GbE), and recovery speeds can outpace client-side write performance on the servers being restored.
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0:00 Introduction from HPE Raleigh
0:56 Lab walkthrough with Chad
1:19 Why DPAN matters: speed
2:06 How the accelerator node works
3:29 Test environment: 30 hosts, 1,440 VMs
4:08 Taking performance off paper
5:02 1.2 PB/hr and why HPE quotes numbers
5:43 AI, data growth, and backup windows
7:16 Availability and customer adoption
7:51 Kevin's hardware deep-dive with Bob Jensen
10:30 First full backup results
11:08 Back in the StorageReview lab
13:29 Three infrastructure readiness takeaways
15:31 Recovery challenges and scaling with DPAN