Thanks David. I'd like to hear more about this idea that Netapp may abandon snapmanager. Last Sunday we successfully took a final backup of our databases, shut down production and brought up the DR sql server. Our storage guy, who is still pretty new to all of this, had to manually point and click to bring the luns online. Then I had to attach all of the databases myself -- something I thought snapmanager would do. Not a big deal since I scripted the attachment process.

Next he needs to learn powershell and how to script bringing up the DR filer so that can happen quicker. One 3 TB "piece of disk real estate" containing scanned images didn't come online even though we thought it was being snapped along with the data files.

One of the most difficult/frustrating things is the use of terms like backup, restore etc since they don't necessarily mean the same things in the storage world. The backups do seem to be "backups" since they write to the sql log, but given that they occur in under two minutes for roughly 3 TB of databases they are only capturing the "deltas" and not in any way the same as a sql database backup which would take hours.