Coming from the AMANDA world at one (much smaller) point in my life, I miss 
this feature, and asked about this a few months back. There are two options:

1) Write backups to a disk STU, then vault them to tape. (or use bpduplicate 
and scripting)

2) Depending on how the file patterns are, you can stage them to disk, and back 
them up from there. This has the added advantage of having 'near-line' restore 
speeds for crucial data -- (l)users love that. This also costs a lot of 
scratch. Our current setup is to use this for inbox.exite.com user mail, due to 
the visibility of that product, as well as all of our production databases -- 
to the tune of $5mm or so in EMC and horsepower...  Depends on the criticality 
of your data to your enterprise. In the case of user mail, we use SRDF, but the 
database tablespaces are just scp'd in parallel because of their size. (with 
the DB in hotbackup mode, etc..)

JF

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 02:07:11PM +1100, Duane Schultz spake unto the 
multitudes:
> 
> We're currently working on a datacenter project to manage customer
> backups, and because of the variety in speeds and throughputs and the
> number of servers that we will be backing up, it would be nice to be
> able to stage backups straight to disk, moving them off to tape as
> available 'scratch' space is required.
> 
> We have a medium sized Netbackup 3.4 infrastructure at the moment, and
> would prefer to stay with it.
> 
> I realise that we could setup disk based storage units under netbackup,
> and layer some sort of HSM on top, but I'm not confident how cleanly
> that would integrate, or how manageable it would be in the long term.
> 
> Has anyone done something like this ? Is there a netbackup extension to
> handle it ? Are we way off track ?
> 
> (For what it's worth, we're Sun Solaris/Sparc based, using ATL backup
> hardware and a mixture of Sun and NetApp storage. Any hardware solution
> would be fcal/san based)
> 
> -- 
> | Duane Schultz                               System Manager |
> | duane AT connect.com DOT au                connect.com.au pty ltd |
> | Tel: +61 3 9251 3676              Level 9, 114 Albert Road |
> | Fax: +61 3 9251 3666        South Melbourne 3205 Australia |
> _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
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-- 
"you may write good code, but I have the front-panel key, fan-boy"
Joshua Fielden, Senior Systems Administrator and Backups Team Lead
eXcite@Home, Inc. jfielden AT excitecorp DOT com 650-556-3316