Distributing RMAN backups across multiple disks

Question:  I need an RMAN backup strategy to distribute by RMAN backup across five disks, each on a separate mount point.  We have 5 mount points (NFS mounted, on a T1 interconnect). How can I evenly distribute the RMAN backup files across the five disk spindles?
Answer:  Oracle RMAN has the ability to automatically distribute files if you are using ASM, or you can the "allocate channel" RMAN command, to pipe the output backup files to multiple mount points on separate disks.

RUN
{
ALLOCATE CHANNEL c1 DEVICE TYPE DISK FORMAT '/u01/xxx';
ALLOCATE CHANNEL c2 DEVICE TYPE DISK FORMAT '/u02/xxx';
BACKUP DATABASE PLUS ARCHIVELOG;
}

Or perhaps consider the "configure channel" RMAN syntax to distribute the backup files across multiple disks:

CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE DISK FORMAT '/u01/%U', '/u02/%U';
In these cases where an RMAN job is reading and writing from multiple disks at the same time, consider using the RMAN parallel options to speed-up elapsed time for the backup job.