Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Data Efficiency > Next-Generation Storage Efficiency with Dell PowerScale Inline Data Reduction > Compression and backup in a mixed cluster
A mixed F810 and A2000 cluster is configured for NDMP backup from the A2000 nodes. When a backup job runs, the A2000 nodes retrieve all the compressed chunks from the pertinent F810 nodes over the backend network (RBM). Since the A2000 has no FPGA offload card, the decompression of the chunks is performed in software. Once the chunks have been decompressed, each file is reassembled and sent over Fibre Channel (2-way NDMP) or Ethernet (3-way NDMP) in uncompressed form to the backup device or devices.
With NDMP, deduplicated data is rehydrated when it leaves the cluster, and shadow stores and shadow links are not preserved on the backup. The NDMP tape device or VTL will need to have sufficient space to house the full size of the dataset.