The Data Protection Accelerator (DPA) node functions as a specialized gateway and deduplication processor deployed in front of the HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 object store. While the underlying X10000 array serves as an object target supporting native S3 APIs directly, the DPA node specifically hosts and exposes HPE StoreOnce Catalyst target endpoints.

By presenting Catalyst stores to integrated enterprise backup applications (such as Commvault, Veeam, and Veritas NetBackup), the DPA node executes source-side or target-side deduplication, offloading data reduction computation from production hosts and the core storage controllers. The deduplicated unique data blocks are subsequently persisted to the high-performance all-flash object store, making StoreOnce Catalyst the designated backup target type provisioned on the DPA node itself.