The environment we are about to implement is ADSM V3 on AIX with a 3494
containing 2 3590 drives, and an EXB 10i at the central site.  We have
a large installed base of AIX, HP-UX, SUN and NT clients.

We will also have 2 remote sites which will be single NT servers with
an EXB 10i each.

We are migrating from Legato and 4 EXB 10i on AIX.

This is done due to bandwidth limitation problems in being able to do
(incremental) backups of the remote sites to the central location
within a reasonable time window.

My question is can we physically transport the tapes from the remote
sites to the central site to migrate the data to the 3494 and produce
several copies of 3590 tapes there, one to be kept in the 3494 and the
second to be kept offsite?

Small file restores will be able to be performed over the WAN, will the
remote system be able to access the data from this separate (and
central) server?

Full system recoveries, in the case of complete sytem failure, will
probably be performed at the central site and then transported to the
remote site so bandwidth will not be an issue.

An alternative scenario will be to produce two copies of 8mm tapes at
the remote site (which is supported with a sngle drive under V3), so
that the EXB 10i can always contain the first copy and the 2nd copy
brought to the central site for migration to 3590 (which will be much
faster if a full system recovery is required).

And yes I know a 3570 library would be a better option for the remote
sites but we already have the 8mm drives!

I would appreciate any comments on the above scenarios.

Regards,
Simon Watson