Thanks for your input everyone. You've helped me confirm my initial direction is valid - backup to disk and then allow our infrastructure group backup the files to tape.

Currently our databases are backuped up to tape directly and there are all sorts of issues. It currently takes 9+ hours to do a full backup of all our databases (just under 1 TB). And that's only production. My new proposal is going to go straight to disk plus include a few additional optimizations (to name a few):

- Use compression where necessary

- Use multiple backup files (up to 1 per CPU)

- Separate backup traffic from the network traffic

I see no reason why we cannot backup 1 TB of data to disk in 30 minutes tbh. I based most of this on a case study for fast and reliable backup and restore of VLDB over the network.