All-

We're preparing to do initial setup and integration of our brand new
Data Domain 860 with NetWorker and I'm looking for advice from experienced
Data Domain users on whether what we're wanting is even possible.

We have for years been fortunate enough to have many of our clients
and our NetWorker server dual-homed, with one NIC on our primary/public
network, and a second NIC on a private/backup-only network.  There's
no routing between the two networks.

If, for example, the backup client known to the public as foo.ndsu.edu
has a NIC on our private network, then that NIC has a corresponding
DNS name of foo-s.ndsu.edu and that's the actual client name that was
used when configuring the NetWorker client definition.  Since most
(but not all) of our biggest clients are dual-homed, this results
in those clients doing their backups over our private backup network.
Any clients that are only on our public network obviously do their
backups over the public network.

That's worked great for the 15+ years its been in place, since all of
the backup data was flowing through the NetWorker server to get to
the (tape) storage.

Now that we have a Data Domain system and our NetWorker server will
shortly be upgraded to NetWorker 8.0sp2 (most clients already are),
we're trying to figure out how to make the same dual-homed
configuration work with Data Domain, while still utilizing
client-direct backup.

Our plan had been to put the DD's 10 Gib NIC on our private network,
use an ifgroup with four of the DD's 1 Gib NICs on our public network,
and then use the remaining two NICs for the "management interface",
putting that on the private network as well.

We've been told there's an initial handshake that happens over the
management interface when a backup is initiated.  My understanding is
the handshake is between the backup server and the DD.  Since our
backup server has access to both the public and private network,
it would therefore be able to perform the handshake if we did choose
to put the DD's management NICs on the private network.

What is not at all clear to me is

- for a client that has NICs on both the public and private networks,
  what tells it to do the direct-client backup to the DD over the private
  network?

- if we put the DD's management interface(s) on our private network,
  will that impair the clients that *only* have access to the public
  network from being able to do client-direct?  They could still reach
  the 1 Gib interfaces in the ifgroup on the public network, but they
  wouldn't have any route to either the management interface(s) or the
  10 Gib NIC.

Is there anyone doing this or something similar already?  Any thoughts
or wisdom from experienced DD+NetWorker users would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney AT ndsu DOT 
edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building                             701-231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164