Hi,
just to add some clarification:
What I am seeing is that my two tape drives are now actively writing to tape but by session is still running on my CM. There appears to be lettle to no network activity on the CM server. I am not seeing my MA's being overworked at all.
In your topology, it's absolutely expected for the CM server to see little network traffic. The fat pipe is from DAs to MAs, and that should be monitored for proper saturation. The only significant data going to the CM (apart from the trickling that is control traffic) is the metadata stream which conveys filenames, attributes etc for the DCBF and CDB to stow away, but that is dwarfed by the real (payload) data flow towards the MA hosts (and that's a good thing).
HTH,
Andre.