Ah, I didn't know that, backing up directly to tape indeed avoids problems that are inherent to disk (slow spindles, fragmented drives, queue lengths, etc.) However, we've staged our backup by first backing up to disk and then duplicating to tape, to stream the backup data to tape. You realise that the way you are backing up now, for every single file, the tape start up, writes the file and then comes to a screeching halt? It's like driving you're car, pulling up very fast and immediately after picking up some speed making an emergency stop. It's very bad for your tapes and autoloader, but for you situation your dealer should be able to inform you better about this :)
Anyway, back on topic: Try to backup a selection of very large files from your fileservers (about 100GB will give you nice performance data) Copy those files to your Exchange server and then create a backup job to backup those files. See wether there's a significant speed difference. From that point we can look further to come to a solution :) By the way, do you have EMC Powerpath installed on any servers?
Message Edited by Jeff1981 on 05-21-200705:03 AM