Michael, I'd like to recommend something that is more of an architecture change 
than a straight solution to your backup situation.

If you need to upgrade your main file sharing system, and you need to address 
large filesystems and backup constraints, go buy a NAS unit.

There are lots of vendors out there that can provide very modestly priced 
systems that have clustered file servers, support CIFS, large filesystems, and 
best of all, NDMP for backups.  We use Windows for most of our environment, in 
fact I run my NW environment on it and am extremely happy with the performance. 
 But for merely sharing out files, NAS units leave traditional OS's (any 
flavor) running on server hardware in the dust.

I know this is beyond the scope of your situation, but it might be worth a 
conversation with your vendor and a couple of hours scribbling on a whiteboard. 
 Obviously, if you're running clustered Windows servers, you have some sort of 
shared storage infrastructure.  You might be able to leverage that into 
something that solves your backup situation and a host of other issues that 
aren't on your radar at all....

Just for comparison purposes, I have 3 Celerra NAS units with 35TB of data 
total, roughly distributed equally across all three.  I do a full backup of 
each Celerra 1 day per week, spread over three days.  One of my Celerras is a 
little more utilized than the other two, and has extremely dense filesystems 
(150 - 200 million files on it).  It typically takes no longer than 8 hours for 
a full backup to run via NDMP for any of the units, though sometimes the really 
dense ones will run 14 or 15 hours. The backups are using 4 NDMP backup streams 
to LTO3 tape drives and media.  

Every shop is different, I wouldn't want say that this would definitely solve 
your problem, but maybe it's something for you to ponder at the very least.

HTH
--brerrabbit

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