>Network upgrade ETC is 6-8 months.  I was hoping for an interim solution.

Your best bet, then, may be to implement a solid AIX or RAID mirroring
scheme at the remote sites: they can continue to operate if a disk
fails and get another into place quickly to resume mirroring, which
will avoid having to back up in the interim.  Once networking is in
place, the mirroring will be an additional safeguard for the site.
You could also consider using the AIX 'backup' and 'restore' commands
for full+incremental (traditional) backups to local tape drives in
the interim (as in high-capacity 8mm or whatever).       Richard