All right, I'll share my technique with you:

Multi streaming means to have more than one job working on the problem.
 Ideally, this works best with clients that have more than one disk or
filespace, otherwise you can create big time disk contention by doing this.
 To use multi-streaming simply open more than one window on your
workstation, start dsmc and start multiple backups at the same time.
 Preferably working on different filespaces.  From this you can determine
if you might benefit from multi-streaming.  BTW, you can do the same thing
with restores.

To do this using a schedule, you will create n schedule daemons (in NT, you
use the dscmutil to create multiple services), each with a different
options file.  Each daemon will identify itself to the server as the same
node name.  Each different options file will specify a different domain to
backup.  You can either do this with the domain statement or using
include/exclude processing.  After creating the daemons, start them.  On
NT, you will have n services running.  All of them have identified
themselves as node mumblefratz and obtained the schedule from the server.
 In polling mode, they will all start their backups at the requested time.

So, in your four different options files, I would have different domains or
include/exclude options, different schedlogname and errorlogname (if you
don't do this, you don't even want to look at dsmsched.log!), the same
nodename and perhaps different server names if you want to use multiple
NICs.

This is cool.  How many of you are doing this already with success?

In prompted mode, as long as they are all on the same IP address, they will
probably start at the same time.  I didn't try prompted mode in my testing,
but common sense suggests if the IP address is the same, i.e., all will
start at the same time.  However, one reason you might undertake this
approach in the first place is to use multiple NICs in your clients and
servers.  In this case, I think you would have a problem doing this in
prompted mode.  Stick to polling.  I will cogitate on this further to see
what I think...

I don't know how clear this all is as I am under the influence of cold
medication.  Questions, fire away!

Kelly Lipp
Storage Solutions Specialists, Inc.
lipp AT storsol DOT com
www.storsol.com
(719) 531-5926