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Cathleen A. Gagne, Senior Editorial Director
In most cases, the best choice is to backup the cluster from a remote machine with client agents installed on each machine in the cluster. This will take the resource load off of the cluster itself. The alternative to doing remote backups would be to install backup software on the cluster. The two types of installs would be to either install backup software to each node in the cluster or to install at each node to the same place on a shared volume, and configure for failover. If you install backup software to each individual node in the cluster, then it will be configured the same way non-clustered machines are configured. So, whether your have two machines and two tape drives, or you have a fibre library and plan on using a SAN/NAS and want to take full advantage of your resources, then you would configure backup software as if the two machines were standalones. This reduces the load on the network to the remote agents. The key is trading speed for simplicity. This was first published in March 2003