I've been told that the NBU 7 implementation of the vStorage API will allow you to backup ESX 3.5 servers without a proxy server (and without vSphere) You will not get all of the features available through the API (BLIB), but you will be able to perform the backup without a proxy server and I suspect get restore over the SAN. Expect more concrete details as the NBU 7 release gets closer to our annouce date.
Related link on vStorage API and why VMware is not allowing just anybody to write scripts/call to it.
Or attend one of our bi-weekly webcasts and talk to our in-house VMware expert yourself - he might just tell you what's in the pipe. Go to
www.netbackupdemo.com to sign-up for the live webcasts.
Peter E