You will need CASO as the glue for all of your media servers between the locations.  As well as the Dedupe option too more than likely to minimize bandwidth during the backup SET copy.  It is licensed per media server.

With CASO as your mgmt interface, you will do a backup to your dedupe storage folder.  You will then have 2nd job in your policy to do a duplicate job to the other media server that hosts a dedupe storage folder.  That duplicate job will send an "optimized copy," of data between media servers.  Sending only the unique blocks of data between the backups.  

Obviously you will want to do your first duplicate job locally to save on bandwidth, ship the server to your 2nd site, and resume operation.  You'll also need to track what your daily rate of change is for your data.  a single T1 with about 20ms of latency can only do around 6GB of data per 24hrs...

So I will need 3 dedupe licences and 1 CASO?

Hello,

Yes, 1 CASO with 2 Managed Media Server (MMS) Licenses and 3 DeDup Licenses for every Media Server.

Thanks you Both!

Hi,

You dont need CASO for setting up that backup environment. You only need SSO and Dedup options for all three servers, and of course Backup Exec Media server licenses.

Of course it's easy to handle with CASO but it's not needed.

 JT_T, you are incorrect.

CASO is explicitly needed to do a duplicate backup copy between media servers.  The Admin Guide states this, the help file in BE states this, and it has been verified with Symantec as well.

SSO is ONLY for sharing a fiber channel tape library/drive between multiple media servers.

teiva-boy,

CASO is not needed, and if it's verified with Symantec, someone there didn't know what he was talking about:)

I've verified with Symantec, i've tested in lab and in real environment, CASO is not needed for using Optimized Dedup.

SSO will let you share Dedup storage with other BE servers, that's all you need.

I know that BE Admin guide says this;

"If you use the Central Admin Server Option, you can also copy data from a deduplication storage folder on a managed media server to a deduplication storage folder on another managed media server."

But, you can do same thing without CASO, and information given by Symantec's technical presales is that you dont violate licensing if you do same thing without CASO.

SSO is not only for sharing fiber devices between media servers, you can now use it for sharing Dedup Storage folders as well. Go ahead, test it, find out.

There's plenty of other things you can now do with BE2010, no matter what still open Admin guide says.

 I never said you cant do optimized dedupe without CASO.

Let me restate things.  You cannot do an optimized duplicate to another media server without CASO.  CASO is the glue, with out it, one media server will not know about the other media server nor it's storage targets.  WIthout CASO, each media server is its own island of data that will not talk to each other.

Please explain to me with steps if possible, what you did to setup the two media servers, and do a duplicate job (with dedupe) between the two media servers without using CASO.  So I can be corrected. (And so I can test it)

One a side note, how do you share other than tape, disk in BE with SSO?  You CANNOT share an NTFS volume between two windows hosts.  SSO doesnt magically solve that issue either.  Check the HCL, for SSO, ONLY tapes are listed.

Hi teiva-boy,

With SSO and new Dedup devices, you can share Dedup storage between media servers without CASO. You just need to share Dedup Storage between media servers, from each Dedup Storage Folder's properties. There's a tip box to share Dedup Storage with other media servers, after tipping the box and restarting media server's services (not sure if needed) you can see shared Dedup Storage folders between other media servers. After sharing Dedup Storage folders, you can for example create policy to run backups to local Dedup, and create another policy to duplicate backups from local Dedup Storage to different media server's Dedup Storage folder.

So, with only having SSO and Dedup licenses, you can share Dedup Storage Folders, and media servers can see and they can use those other Dedup Storage folders. And again, with Dedup Storage folders, only SSO is needed for each media servers to share Dedup Storage folders.

I am looking at doing a similar thing to this, I was wondering what happens though if the MMS dies?  The jobs will be logged in the SQL DB on the MMS and restores will not be possible?  Is this correct.

Would a centralised SQL DB help with this?

Centralising your DB/catalogs etc. assumes you have very fast lines between your sites. However, if your CASO goes down, all your backups go down until they can contact the CASO again.
I use local catalogs/DBs, and the CASO primarily for checking the backups. However, if you want a bit more reslience, try creating the catalogs on both servers (Replicated).

Thanks very much for that, can I just replicate the catalogs?  

Would that also work though, If I were to backup from the MMS (local db/cat) to a DEDUPE store on the CAS, and replicate the catalogs to the CAS, would this allow a restore from the CAS to a server in case of WAN LINK / MMS failure?