NBU 5220 Appliance Media Server writing to another 5220 appliance

[vaughns]

I am researching a solution to refresh a Netbackup Master Server and Media Server environment with NBU 5220 Appliances. My question is in regards to the ability of a 5220 Appliance to write to another 5220.  Is it possible to have a 5220 Media Server write to another 5220 appliance? I know there are a few other options that would possibly be more effective such as a combination of 5220's and 5020's when larger pools of storage are required but I am not considering the 5020 at this point. 

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

Not sure exactly what you are getting at here. An appliance is just a NetBackup Media Server running MSDP so what ever that can do an appliance can do. They can share fingerprinting processing etc. but have no concept of global de-dupe. You can duplicate from one to another but would not use one as a Media Server accessing another ones pool via OST as you can only have one MSDP pool per media server Hope this helps

[Umair_Hussain]

If I understand correctly, Yes you can do that, you need to treat 5220 as media server make a separate MSDP pool out of your second appliance and you should be good to go...

[Brook_Humphrey]

To clarify a little maybe. You can offload fingerprinting and allow one appliance to do fingerprinting for the storage unit on another appliance. It may be better to use client side dedupe than use this option but it is possible. you would have to have both appliances in the same netbackup domain. One of them can be the master with the other as a media server or you can have another master with both appliances as media servers.

The downside is that if you enable it that way the appliances automaticly load ballance accross media servers. You have no control of this functionality and it will automaticly choose the media server that it will do the fingerprinting on. What this means to you is that the backup data wil be sent to that media server were it will be deduped and then sent to the destination MSDP. 

If you are able to use client side dedupe you may find this to be a better option to distribute the fingerprinting and sending of the data as it will put less load on your over all network infrastructure and you still get the benfits of load balancing your backup fingerprinting.

Hope this helps. If you have nay further questions please ask.

Thanks