With respect to your first issue: This seems to be weird as any clone can only start once the save set has been completed. And you are talking about actions in a single workflow. So these must be sequentially 'connected'. But you are also talking about 'schedulers'.This might be a bug (for a specific NW version).   With respect to parallel cloning - sure, this method will have a certain impact on other 'areas' in your data zone. But what do you want to know? - only you know your environment and each environment is different depending what else happens at the same time. There is only one method to find out: test, test, test .... test. The only thing I can say so far is that the slowest backup device will obviously not limit the overall speed.  
We need to run three clone actions in a workflow in order to keep backups for different purposes and with different retentions. I tried to sequence the actions one after another               [backup] ==> [clone1] ==> [clone2] ==> [clone3] We found that if the clone action [clone1] skipped due to its scheduler, the actions [clone2] and [clone3] would not be run. Is this the normal behavior? This is not what we want, each clone action has its own different scheduler. They should run on their scheduled dates regardless the result of other clone actions. So we tried a different order                                  |==> [clone1]               [backup] ==|==> [clone2]                                  |==> [clone3] It works. The three clone actions will start at the same time after the backup succeed. Does this ordering have any performance concern as they run together?
A question about action order in a workflow