some of the NAS pains are because of multi  vendor enviroment and NDMP 
implementation, it took me a while to figure out NDMP backup senarios, but 
once i did, everything is working very well with Legato, there is 
alternative such as Hitachi, IBM Shark & DMX all at much much heigher 
cost, do you think Powerpath, FDR\SOS cost less? think again, you can do 
OS update on Netapp withen minutes, try doing that with Sym.
I would recomend carefull planing & consideration etc before buying NAS, 
Netapp has saved us so many time with it's capabilty to grow the file 
systems on the fly ( other vendors offer similar funtionality)
i would also consider Cluster storage such as Issilion with NDMP support, 
which ever vendor you use, make sure your DR plan is in place and tested.
NDMP version 4 may be suited better then some older implementations also.

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