3- As of now, I am processing on a Staging server and restoring the database on our Production server. I am trying to optimize our promotion method.
you've got these other options for that:
1) Analysis Services database synchronisation functionality (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174928.aspx)
this has the advantage of "sending" only the changes made to the data
2) copy and paste the data from one location to another (using Robocopy maybe?)
3) Analysis Services 2008 shared scalable database functionality (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc278097(v=SQL.100).aspx)
Francesco Q.