David,

no apologies are necessary, our data protection strategy does look confusing from the outside and I think we could do a better job of explaining it to avoid the confusion.

There are some really interesting longer-term developments in infrastructure automation where we expect applications like SQL server to make requests for storage resources independently of the storage admin or DBA.

Imagine if the database, based on the code of a stored procedure, was able to provide hints or explicit instructions to the storage layer about which parts of the database are about to become hot, and then the storage array was able to proactively move indexes, columns etc into solid-state storage close to the CPU of the database engine. NetApp does a pretty good job of that today by dynamically recognizing workload patterns in real time and making intelligent guesses about what will be asked for next, but it could be a lot more efficient/aggressive with the right kind of supporting information. In order to do that there needs to be something that understands the layout of both the database, and the supporting storage resources.

I'm not saying that this is a feature of an upcoming SnapManager release, but it's this kind of thing that means we will invest in storage and data management software like SnapManager for SQL for the foreseeable future.

Regards

John Martin