Backup Exec & Multiple Servers

So I'm looking at our current Backup Exec system and am running into a very basic issue with only a stupidly complex solution as far as I've seen on their site.

Servers back up one at a time.

We have a selection list that has all of our servers on it, I just noticed that there is NO way to get Backup Exec to do multiple streams of all the agents, and that the current solution is to buy Netbackup, which at this point: no.

Recommended solution:

Run with multiple selection lists (I'd probably want something like 5-8 to take advantage of my hard drive speeds), of course this leads to 10-16 backup jobs, and 5-16 to-tape jobs (this is a BIG no-no, I need to be able to consolidate them). While I can probably get by with this, a company with 20-25 servers should NOT have nearly as complicated a setup as this, this is a ridiculous work around IMO.

Some people seem to run with one server per backup! Ack, how do you manage that? That will be like 50 jobs (25 fulls, 25 diffs, I guess policies and templates make it easy to deploy, but changes become a nightmare! Unless policies keep track of jobs they've created and will simply update them (so you don't lose job history)), and I have no clue how you consolidate those 25 backups to one tape backup.

What I need:

Weekly fulls and daily differentials to disk, followed by tape dumps of each one, weeklies consist of about 4-5 tapes, dailies should be about 1-2 in terms of data processed (hence why I don't want 5 tape jobs).

Is there something I'm missing here? Or do I really need to take on the task of micro management of our backup system in order to get the performance out of it that I need (backups are going to start taking 30+ hours for fulls because of this sequential processing of each server, and that gets kind of unacceptable).

What I'm looking to probably do is create a handful of selection lists (server breakdown), two templates (weekly/daily), a policy (our two templates), auto generate the jobs for the selection lists…. but how do I get it to push them all to one tape? Wouldn't a policy make unique jobs for every backup? bleh. 🙁

Let alone adding new selection lists to the tape backup might get tricky. I guess I can do a folder backup of the to disk dump, but that will make it so the tapes aren't "aware" of the data that is on them (AFAIK), which means I have to restore an entire tape set to browse the backups (bleh).

Also, I would like ONE to tape backup job a day because I currently have a notification go to our helpdesk so we can manage who grabbed the ticket and handled the backup that day (we have other paperwork too, but this helps us know who took responsibility), but if I had to set a tape as appendable for 24 hours and drop this feature I guess I'll live.

Edit:

So far investigation leads me to:

• Policy with 4 templates, Daily, Daily duplicate, Weekly, Weekly duplicate. Set tapes to allow appending for 24 hours, and let BackupExec keep appending data to the tapes as each server finishes it's backup (this is good because it will allow me to stream one server to tape while the others finish).

I will lose the ability to auto-report on tapes (that kinda sucks) and I seem to be unable to auto-eject media.

If there are any corrections I can make, please advise. 🙂