Cross-site backup for consolidated backup to tape

[RMullis]

Currently at our company we have 2 datacenters with 75 virtual servers at each location. We have been using Veeam B&R for over a year now and are very happy with it. We backup to tape using Symantec Backup Exec 2012 at both datacenters. We are adding another location we have acquired that will become our 3rd datacenter. The hardware at the new datacenter is rather old so we are upgrading to new SAN and servers. To help with expenses I would like to consolidate our “backups to tape” to just 1 main datacenter which will save us thousands of dollars in upgrade costs at the new facility. My proposal was to cross-site replicate and backup replicas to tape but since the replicas contain snapshots this is not possible since I also need to use CBT. My second plan is to backup to the main datacenter and once a week backup to tape for offsite data retention. I currently have this working from my secondary large datacenter and it works fine. If secondary site goes down I can perform instant recovery and the Storage vMotion to final datastore and stop publishing for faster DR restoration of site to my main datacenter. I do see one issue, as I was considering DR if the primary site goes down, even though I do perform replication, I can’t replicate all of the servers so when I need to restore data from tape to secondary site the data will be at worst case 7 days old. So this means I will need to backup daily to tape. Still working out the details here.
So my question is, am I reinventing the wheel here; has anyone or is anyone performing this type of setup? Am I missing something big that will cause me a big issue in the future? Any and all assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rick

[foggy]

Rick, common approach among our customers is to replicate mission critical VMs only and backup all other VMs offsite. Do you have the ability to store these backups at your secondary site? If you already have these backups locally at the main datacenter, you could use third-party synchronization software to sync them to the secondary location.

[RMullis]

Thank you foggy. I read through and it is exactly what I was looking for. Not the results I was hoping for but at least it is an answer.