Q from Sven - Are mysqlhotcopy and ibbackup only part of 6.0?
mysqlhotcopy is available in all releases. ibbackup is a separate offering that has been available for a long time

Q from Adam: Is the SQL based output portable to another database server engine e.g. MSSQL?
There are options of mysqldump that make the output as much generic as possible, and that is portable, but we can't guarantee it works with every RDBMS. The DDL is the less portable section

Q from Andrea: Is a hot mysqldump generally a good idea?
Unfortunately the answer is "it depends". With MyISAM, for example, this is not generally a good idea, since you have to lock the tables to make the dump consistent - i.e. it is not a hot dump anymore, you may call it "warm". With InnoDB the dump is consistent, provided we execute it with the Repeatable read isolation level.

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Thanks to all of you who have attended! (and apologise for having posted this info after such a long time)
We have had lots of questions and very interesting feedback and suggestions.

You can find the slides and the Webex presentation here.

I would like to post more on this subject, specifically on snapshot backup, comparing the different options with NetApp, DRBD and LVM.