We recently migrated from BE to Netbackup and had the same concern about 
reading the BackupExec
Media.   We were going to use the Netbackup BE tape reader option, which is 
basically a BE
installation sitting inside of Netbackup.  We decided not to do this, in fact 
Veritas strongly
advised against the BE tape reader option, because it added complexity and 
another layer to
troubleshoot if anything went wrong w/ the installation. Our BE installation 
included the SSO option
so all the catalogs resided on a single BE server.  We kept this server in 
place, and attached to
our SAN fabric, stopping all BE services and setting them to manual. If we had 
a very large restore
we shut down NBU, bring up BE which could access our tape library, import the 
required tapes and run
the restore.  This also gave us a fallback plan if anything went wrong w/ the 
NBU installation.  We
also installed BE on a separate server w/ a single direct attached tape drive, 
and migrated the BE
catalog and PVL.mdb file to that server and used it for smaller day to day file 
restores.  As time
went by the restore requests from the old BE tapes became less and less. 
Eventually we retired the
SAN attached BE installation.  At this point the BE media is almost all expired 
and usable in
Netbackup, and what's left is archival media that will probably never be used 
again.


Vincent Mase
Perot Systems