Appreciate if anybody can provide any advice or insight into the following.

We currently have a 3494 with 2 3590 drives.  We are looking to add up
to 2 more drives this year.  This is used by ADSM on on RS/6000 platform.

We also currently have OpenMail on HP platform, which is about to go
through a major upgrade & will have about 50 GB of mirrored disk.  We
currently back this up by splitting the mirrors, thus creating a
snapshot and backing the non active copy via the LAN to the ADSM
server.  It is felt by the OpenMail people that such a file based
backup would not give them the restore speeds that a pure raw disk
backup would.  They are looking at Omniback with several standalone
DLT7000 drives to provide the solution.  Apparently Omniback can do Raw
disk backups (which ADSM can't).

Now I don't really know the DLT7000 & have nothing against it per se (I
don't want any responses comparing 3590 & DLT thanks!) but it makes
sense to use the infrastructure we already have & need to invest in anyway.

We could do a number of things:

      perservere with file based backup using ADSM (dedicated LAN etc)

      directly connect HP system to 1 or more 3590 drives and hopefully
Omniback can work with 3494 as well.

Does anybody have any experience on this 2nd option?  In particular can
a 2nd system (using Omniback or ADSM) share the same drives (as I
beleive they are all dual ported anyway) in the 3494, and dynamically
allocate them between the two systems?

Any experiences would be useful.

Regards,
Simon