5220 Appliance Topology - Help

[-matt-]

Hi.  Need help with appliance configuration.

1 NBU Domain, 1 NBU Master 7.1 (Datacentre 1)

Datacentre 1 
1 x physical Master
3 x 32Tb 5220
Load balanced MSDP of all appliances.
Duplication target for Datacentre 2 and remote sites.
Manage tape library for long retention.

Datacentre 2
2 x 32Tb 5220
Load balanced MSDP of both appliances.
Duplication of images to Datacentre 1 for tape out.

Remote sites x 6
1 x 4Tb 5220
Local de-dupe of clients, then duplicate images back to Datacentre 1 for tape out.

The questions I have are;

Can the three appliances in Datacentre 1 be aggregated into one storage pool (96Tb) and be load balanced and share de-dupe metadata?
Can the two appliances at Datacentre 2 be aggregated into one storage pool (64Tb) and be load balanced and share de-dupe metadata?
Will the remote site appliances have their own local de-dupe catalogue and not be globally de-duping with DC1 & DC2?

Suppose the remaing question would be (if yes, yes, yes) how can I implement this?

Thanks in advance. 

--Matt

[Sebastian_Baszc]

Hey Mate,

Unfortunatelly when you configure 5220 you have to configure separate Disk Pool and Storage Unit. You can configure the load balancing as far as exchanging calculations between Storage Servers (if configured on the Storage Unit Level). The only real virtualisation would be having the all Storage Units under one Storage Unit Group. You need to dig in the admin guide to find out which mechanism is the recommended one and the best for deduplication. From top of my head it would be Failover. 

Now... if you want to use optimised duplication - you shouldn't really use Storage Unit Groups, as according to Symantec - if SUG is used - normal duplication is applied (meaning - no optimised, global dedup). Additional reconsideration would be - configuration of optimised duplication between sites. For that purpose - review the dedup admin guide. There are a few slides which illustrate the process. Just keep in mind - don't enable the load balancing on the STU level and on the Storage Server level before reading that section of the admin guide. Otherwise you can finish with the data being sent somewhere you don't want it to be. 

Finally - why 5220s? I reckon it would be more efficient and more scalable if you had 5020s. In that situation you could have one SPA/Storage Server connected to the Media Server(s) and optimised duplication from the remote sites to the primary site. Apart of that - 5020s (or SPA) can be scaled up to 192TB (raw) without any additional changes in NetBackup environment - you just add the CR (content router) or additional appliance to the SPA and that's all. 

Hope it helps.

S

[-matt-]

Sebastian,

Thanks for the reply.  Given what you've said and the info I've read about the optimized duplication, it looks like the 5220 offers pretty much a standalone solution only scalable to 32Tb.  I'll have to point each policy to a STU manually and will not be benefitting from global de-dupe.
The 5220 solution was architectured by Symantec Technical staff based on our current needs and future growth.  I'll make sure they are ripped out after three years ! :)

[Sebastian_Baszc · Accepted solution]

Hey Matt,

Hehe..You can completely take the local backups to the SUG (meaning - you can group them under one virtual name and use the SUG in the policy as standard STU). Keep also in mind that a new code for NBU appliances (7.5) will allow to extend the disk pool up to 64TB. 

Hope it helps.

S