Smart Scale provides a federated system deployment model that can be applied to new or existing data center protection infrastructure deployments. Similarly, as with any protection environment, the customer’s backup software and its associated clients are deployed and linked to DD series by means of their protection policies. Data Center is the place where one or more DDRs are grouped together. The Smart Scale service VM (also called the DD Namespace VM) can be deployed directly from the DDMC UI. When the Smart Scale service VM is deployed, a system pool can be created, which is a grouping of DDRs from the list of DDRs in the data center.

For example, in the following figure, there are six DDRs in the data center, of which three DDRs are grouped together to create a system pool. DDMC collects the configuration of all the network interfaces from the DDRs it manages and identifies network groups based on a unique subnet mask, VLAN ID, and network address. An access IP is created on the DDNVM matching the network group. This IP is a dedicated IP address that enables client access to the system pool.

While creating backup policies, select a system pool as the destination for the backup instead of selecting individual DDRs. When a backup application initiates a backup to an MSU, the client will establish a connection using the pool access IP, to the DDNVM. The Namespace redirection service returns the IP address within the same Network Group on the DD series appliance where the MSU resides, and the DD Boost library on the client will redirect the connection to this address. Clients will now start sending data to the appropriate DDR. 

Note: Smart Scale supports the following models: DD9900, DD9400, and DD6900.

Figure 3.   Architectural overview