There has been a flurry of comments and discussion on the NBU 5000, so we thought it would be good to put something up about the newly launched 5200 and how it compares with the 5000. Straight to the hardware spec comparison:
So you can see the 5200 is a little beefed up over the 5000 with more storage, more memory, faster CPU's and more I/O options (FC being the big one). But the biggest difference, and what makes the appliances tick, is the software. The NetBackup 5200 is a full NetBackup 7.0 Media Server. Meaning you can add it to an existing NBU environment, create dedupe pools on it for storage, replicate it to another 5200, hang tape drives off of it etc. Just like you'd install media server software for 7.0 on your own server. The NetBackup 5000 I previously posted about runs PureDisk software so it is more of a dedupe storage appliance than a full backup server.
The 5200 has a bunch of network ports and they can actually be bonded to form a single group for performance and fault tolerance. This is important since NBU media servers typically accept a large number of clients from an IP network. When bonding the 10Gig or 1Gig Ethernet ports together it does adaptive load balancing and doesn't need reconfiguration at the network switch level so backup or storage admins can drop this appliance in without pulling in the network team to muck with their switches (or you don't have to muck with the switch yourself if that's your job).