You can still take care of your concerns about backing up and restoring the
18 gb of data on the server without having
to completely replace what your customers already have - create a 2nd
network solely for backup/restoring your servers -
just add a 2nd network adapter (fast ethernet or higher) to the file
servers and ADSM server. The existing client systems
should not be affected at all. You can also add protection against the
failure of a disk with mirroring or raid-5 with fast
write cache. I think that you will find that a few changes like these would
not be very expensive and the downtime required to recover from disk
failures would be reduced.

As for the existing clients using token ring.... I would expect that these
client machines get replaced over time. When replacements are made you
could then add them to the 2nd network that you created above.

Steve Branch
Phillips Petroleum
e-mail: swbranc AT ppco DOT com