I have a drive in my MP that is a Time Machine drive. I have two more internal hard drives for data, and the 4th internal hard drive for a boot drive.
I also have an external hard drive that is also configured as a Time Machine drive that is my off-site backup strategy. I keep the external HD at my work. Once a month, I bring the external HD from my office to home, plug it in, change my Time Machine disc to point to the external HD, let it back up, then change the Time Machine disc back to the internal TM drive, then bring the external HD back to my office. This way, in case of theft/fire, I still have my offsite backup at work (unless something befalls me the one day per month that I bring the external HD home).
Just make sure that you have not partitioned your internal hard drive that you use for Time Machine, because it won't do you any good to have that data backed up if the same drive backing it up fails.
My MP is for home use, btw, not for work, so for me my backup need is to preserving data, not necessarily maintaining uptime.