Simon:

We've been trying to perform desktop backups for roughly 10K clients for
quite a while. We never seem to have enough horsepower from the network side
to make this a reality. The clients located inside the various data centers
don't seem to have problems getting connected, and getting their backups
done on a nightly basis, but the ones outside the data centers are another
problem all together. Most hang and finally fail; a few make into the
servers.

We've even thought of staggering the backups across the days of the week,
but the bottleneck continues to be the network capacity to accommodate this
much traffic.

So, this is where we've bogged down repeatedly with any scenario we've come
up with. A central repository or a SAN may be the wave of the future, but
it's not here now, and its associated costs nearly rival the costs of
upgrading the network. Six-of-one, half dozen of the other --- we're still
looking for a solution that isn't going to cost the proverbial
arm-and-a-leg.

Good luck!

Cindy

*       Cynthia L. (Cindy) Cannam, MBA
*       Southwestern Bell Telephone
*       Systems Manager/Technical Support
*       Open Systems Storage - ADSM
*       (314)340-0722 work
*       (314)879-1696 pager
*       (314)340-0992 fax