>The organization I work in has four main sites. If a user from site A goes to
>site B and commences a backup with TSM, the backup goes to the server specified
>in his dsm.opt which is the TSM server in site A. This is not a problem if it
>involves only a few MBs but some users have attempted to backup one or two GBs
>over the WAN - this is a problem. The organization has responded in kind by
>blocking the port so that remote backups are simply not allowed.

To be frank, the "problem" is really a manifestation of a company which hasn't
grown its technology along with the organization itself, to fully support the
needs of that organization.  I was just catching up on InfoWorld reading, and
your company's situation is so much like that of case studies where the
companies have not evolved in a unified, proportional way.  Intra-organizational
communication these days necessarily involves the flow of gigabytes of data.
Things change.  Companies which do not recognize that, and adapt, run into
problems.

You don't want to engage in subfile backups (reasons unknown); so your choices
are either locating lesser storage management servers at the multiple sites, to
avoid network traffic; or upgrade your network service.  The latter make more
cost-effective sense.  Time-automated backup schedules from the clients involved
can help distribute the backups around the clock to balance network loading.

  Richard Sims, BU