Just a bit of follow-up. We have been able to move our /rman LUN to it's own spindles in production. Saturday night's level 0 database+archivelog backup finished in roughtly 3.75 hours. This was using the same configuration as I posted in the original post, so 4 channels. I'll cut this down to 2 for next Saturday and see how it times out then. We're working to make similar changes on our development servers in the hopes that duplications will finish in a somewhat reasonable time (e.g. far less than 2 days). -- Don Seiler http://seilerwerks.wordpress.com ultimate: http://www.mufc.us -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l