Many people do simply use snap and replicate as you've described.  But bigger picture it's of course important to keep in mind that snapshots and backups are not the same thing, and serve a different business purpose.  Isilon supports NDMP backups for a very good reason, however NDMP as a protocol has its own problems (backups being filesystem specific for one).

~Chris

Hi Chris,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

We will look at also backing up to NDMP.

Dave