Well I'm trying to get enough information about the best approach to backups, restores and disaster recovery without having to take $10,000 in courses to make the decision. Also trying to get to the truth behind lots of marketing hype.

I did read that the Netapp approach makes getting copies ( "backups" "clones" whatever you want to call it ) of the database available on development servers with flex cloning. And supposedly the mirror/data files/snap remains on the Netapp with the database on the DEV sql server using almost no disk space on the DEV server. That would be helpful and save lots of time copying big sql backups around the network.

But from what's been said in this thread it sounds like for keeping a DR hot standby current we might be better off with log shipping, sql server mirroring or, once on sql 2012, availability groups. I never got the impression from Netapp reps that a DR copy couldn't be kept very current with the snap manager approach -- taking "snap" backups every 15 minutes if necessary. They did caution that you can't have two such "backups" happening at the same time -- no overlap between "log" and "database" backups.

Obviously its tough for a DBA without much storage knowledge to get his/her head around this.

I had come to the conclusion that once a database reaches a certain size, "native" sql stuff just wouldn't hack it. I will look into the Windows Distributed File System approach.

thanks

Randy