Of course it wouldn't be that important if ONTAP supported crontab ( a tiny hint here ).
I put in an RFE for this years ago when it became clear that the filer was going to start handling multiple configurabel timed events - snapshot creation, raid scrubbing, autosupport, etc. Clearly it would make more sense if all of these were collected in a single flat configuration file that admins could edit easily. You could even control the frequency of statd messages and self-initiate backups and other commands.
Bruce