Catalog Backup/AIR

[chack22]

Curious how the functionality works with catalog backups and AIR. If I have a 2 site environment, running AIR between the two, but have tape at the primary site, how would one completely recover the tape backups at the remote site, or after the primary site came back up.

Example.

Site one dies. Recoveries begin immediatly at the DR site.

Can I recover the tape portion of the catalog at the DR site if I need to pull back from those backups? The AIR images will automagically be on the DR side, but the tape catalog information wouldn't be. Trying to plan to rid ourselves of tape if it's the case, but we do have some long-term stuff that we'd either have to import if needed, or be willing to only recover AIR images and then use cat recovery to be able to get at the long-term retention data when the prod site it up and running again.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Air was never meant for NBU catalog replication.

It is meant for backup to dedupe storage, replication of the deduped backups followed by the import of those replicated backups into the catalog of remote master.

Please see this FAQ doc: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH154323

NBU catalogs can be replicated with array replication or Veritas Volume Replicator to a remote site, but that will require same master server hostname at remote site. 
Catalog replication is discussed in NetBackup in Highly Available Environments Administrator's Guide:  http://www.symantec.com/docs/DOC5183 

The alternative is tape imports or 'Recovery without Import'. See http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH28722

[chack22]

"Air was never meant for NBU catalog replication."

Agree, and that's not really what we're hoping to accomplish. Just looking for confirmation that if that's the direction the business wishes to go (instant recovery on remote master of deduped images) we need yet another alternative to protect the primary catalog (eyeing SRM since we're going to VM our master) that may contain tape images if they insist on keeping tape around. I didn't think there was an easy way out, but a Symantec rep gave a different impression when he was talking to the business units.