W2K3 and EVA4000: VSS hardware- and software provider on the same machine?

[MARamius]

Hi,
on all our fileservers we use the VSS/Shadow Copies for Shared Folders - Snapshot-technology to protect individual files (besides daily backups, of course). The up to 64 versions of the Software-Provider gives us approx. one week of instant recovery (Mon-Fri, 7 a.m.-7 p.m., every 2 hours a snap).

One fileserver is "hosted" on a EVA4000, the data-Vdisk is mirrored (using CA) onto another E4K, so we are also protected against hardware failures.

Now I want the EVA4000 VSnap-functionality (especially with the Instant-Restore of XCS6.0 coming August) to take regular On-Demand-Allocated VSnaps in order to protect the whole data volume against logical errors (virus wipes the whole volume, somebody deletes whole folder trees) to get several Point-In-Time-Copies for instant recoveries, provided by the EVA.

There is a hardware-provider for this, to get a consistant EVA-Snap with "freezing" the filesystem first using VSS.

But can I have both this HW-Snaps and the Software-Snaps together?

With the HW-Snaps I can only keep 7 versions instead of 64, the EVA-Snaps needs MUCH more space (after 24 hours a single EVA-Snap is 290GB in size, all 64 snaps together for one week only occupy approx 40-50GB), also the UI for previous versions is much handier than mounting the LUN and then working with several LUNs...

I could of course simply take the Snaps (using CV or RSM), but the filesystem won't be consistent, even using sync.exe from ressource kit doesn't make me feel well...

And only relying of software-VSS for quick disk-based recovery of a whole 650GB volume with only max. 70GB avaliable space for the Snaps simply feels not the right solution.

Any help/ideas/experiences on this topic?

Thanks a lot
MARamius