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Creating two netbackup domains for DR (5200)

Stanleyj
Level 6

I have been having real problems with duplications and restores going to my DR site and I am thinking about splitting my primary site and my DR site into two different netbackup domains.

I have two 5200 (2.0.2) appliances both currently set as media servers.  They use optimized duplication to get data offisite but an issue im having is anything i do on my primary site wants to load balance with the offisite appliance.  What i mean is duplication to tape (local to my primary datacenter), restores, or synthetics backup want to use my Offsite DR appliance to try and complete these jobs.  This mean the data is being returned to me over the WAN link and it takes hours to days depending on data size.

I have worked with support for 3 months off and on about this and I have gotten nowhere so far on how to stop it.

So i was thinking that now with the 2.0 updates i can make my offsite appliance a master/media server and use AIR to get the data to it.  I figured this would solve my issue with trying to use the offisite appliance as a media server and will also speed up recovery time in an actual DR situation.

But is using AIR as efficient as my current setup with them both being media servers and using optimized duplication of deduped data? 

 

What you think?  I am very open to suggestions because the media server issue is causing all kinds of problems with my backups.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Chad_Wansing2
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

So two things for this.  

The first:  to fix your problem of load balancing across the two media servers don't give both media servers visibility to both storage units.  If only one media server has visibility to both, then it will only use one media server.  Generally I set up the production media server with visibility to both storage servers so he can control everything, but here's some good docs to check out:

for a "push" configuration:  http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO70619&actp=search&viewlocale=en_...

for a "pull" configuration:  http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO70620&actp=search&viewlocale=en_...

 

Now, as for AIR, I'm a huge fan.  For our recent (extrememly sizeable) win with NBU appliances at SunGard, AIR was mentioned as one of the trully deciding factors and it's great for several reasons.  First, no matter what happens at your primary site, you've got another master ready to control the restoration of your data.  Second, you can be recovering your business critical data while you're rebuilding your original master in the case of a real DR situation.  And yes, it will be just as efficient as it is today.  The only problem is really one of migration if you already have a lot of data over there.  You can't just magically tell your 5200 he's now a master.  It takes a reconfiguration of the appliance which would involve a factory reset, which would wipe your data.  Perhaps you can stand up a VM master in the DR site and then just join your media server to him but you'd still have the issue of the images on the DR box not expiring like they're supposed to.  Truthfully, unless you've got other sites you want to use that DR site for as well (many-to-one replication), it's probably more trouble than it's worth to put in AIR at this point.  No reason not to consider it for a future design and make it part of your next media server refresh though!

 

Hope this helps!

 

-Chad

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2 REPLIES 2

Chad_Wansing2
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified

So two things for this.  

The first:  to fix your problem of load balancing across the two media servers don't give both media servers visibility to both storage units.  If only one media server has visibility to both, then it will only use one media server.  Generally I set up the production media server with visibility to both storage servers so he can control everything, but here's some good docs to check out:

for a "push" configuration:  http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO70619&actp=search&viewlocale=en_...

for a "pull" configuration:  http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO70620&actp=search&viewlocale=en_...

 

Now, as for AIR, I'm a huge fan.  For our recent (extrememly sizeable) win with NBU appliances at SunGard, AIR was mentioned as one of the trully deciding factors and it's great for several reasons.  First, no matter what happens at your primary site, you've got another master ready to control the restoration of your data.  Second, you can be recovering your business critical data while you're rebuilding your original master in the case of a real DR situation.  And yes, it will be just as efficient as it is today.  The only problem is really one of migration if you already have a lot of data over there.  You can't just magically tell your 5200 he's now a master.  It takes a reconfiguration of the appliance which would involve a factory reset, which would wipe your data.  Perhaps you can stand up a VM master in the DR site and then just join your media server to him but you'd still have the issue of the images on the DR box not expiring like they're supposed to.  Truthfully, unless you've got other sites you want to use that DR site for as well (many-to-one replication), it's probably more trouble than it's worth to put in AIR at this point.  No reason not to consider it for a future design and make it part of your next media server refresh though!

 

Hope this helps!

 

-Chad

Stanleyj
Level 6

Thank you so much chad.  That is the information i was looking for. 

The data on the appliance only has a two month retention and its a duplicate of what is already at my primary datacenter so really I think just starting over and redesigning is what I need to do. 

 

It will be several months before we will have anything capable of running vms in the dr location and i like the idea of not having to maintain another maching also.  Thanks again.