Thanks - I'll look into EBU.
NetApp can generally do snapshots, but (1) we were trying to move as much as we could to rman, (2) our current snapshot procedure is pretty cumbersome and I expected it to remain as kludgey on NetApp, and (3), we think that Unix snapshot might be a seperately licensed NetApp piece that we were trying to avoid.
All the bpbackup tests were running as sudo to root.
/ Sid /