Otto,
Have you upgraded to NCM 7.3 yet ? We have 4 additional pollers, and just upgraded from 7.2.2 to 7.3 and are trying to determine if its possible to rollback due to the workload created. Each of our pollers manage approx. 1,000 nodes, but historically we've always had NCM running only on main engine in a centralized fashion. Node status / statistics was distributed, but backups were centralized. This was due to ACL's and other issues not yet remedied with the merge of multiple health organization (which we are). 7.3 distributes NCM functions, like backups to the same pollers that is managing the node. No exception possible. Be sure that your additional pollers and the nodes they manage, have no issues using the protocols you use to backup (telnet, ssh etc). Performance however on 7.3 is great, I just need to make a decision after assessing issues from 7.3 if we work through the issues, or seek advise from solarwinds on how to roll back.
Epenney