Tape has been a preferred backup media for almost half-a-century now since it had the capability to both backup and archive. Tape media are also portable and thereby giving it a certain advantage. But in the current environments where there has been some heavy data growth, the speed of a tape drive has not been able to keep pace with the required performance. Disk-to-Disk (D2D) backup has arrived as a solution to meet the stringent data storage requirements

The Backup module that comes in with the StorOS firmware serves to mitigate the problems associated typically with a backup procedure and facilitates the administrative tasks associated with backup and restore much simpler. 

When a traditional "legacy" NAS runs out of disk space or slows down due to a heavy workload, a new NAS device must be added to the network, and the file references in all the users' machines have to be remapped to the new drives. This administration headache is eliminated with a NAS gateway because it always presents users with a single folder interface to the storage. More storage can be added without reconfiguring anyone's computer. In addition, splitting a NAS system into gateways and disk arrays allows file processing and storage to be scaled independently of each other.

• Heterogeneous unified storage environment—Designed to provide unified storage access for multi-protocol, multi-vendor storage environments
• Storage consolidation—Designed to enable organizations to consolidate UNIX®, Windows® and Web workloads with existing SAN storage, thereby helping to increase storage utilization.
• Use of existing SAN infrastructure—Designed to integrate into existing SAN storage environments, helping to optimize investment protection and ROI.
• Data Management—Designed to provide advanced data management solutions that maximize availability and can help to significantly reduce operational cost

As enterprise storage requirements evolved from direct-attached to networked storage, many enterprises made significant investments in multiple storage architectures—DAS, SAN and NAS—to support the different access methods required by business solutions. The result was often inefficient and under-utilized storage environments. A critical IT management challenge is to optimize the usage of existing storage to improve efficiency and return on investment (ROI) yet continue to support different access methods for different business solutions throughout the enterprise.

File-level usage and distributed enterprise usage of the SAN environment are ways to improve access and usage of storage resources. Many enterprises, however, are not ready to replace their existing storage systems with new, unified ones. Instead, companies with extensive SAN storage networks are looking for ways to broaden the use of their infrastructures and achieve a greater return on investment by provisioning SAN capacity for new business solutions that require NAS-shared data access and remote access.

The SANAT StorOS baed g4000 NAS Gateway is a network-based solution designed to provide heterogeneous access to Fibre Channel attached storage arrays. The Gateway can help you leverage the dynamic provisioning capabilities of StorOS® software across your existing Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure to support an expanded set of business applications. The SANAT g4000 NAS gateway is based on the StorOS® microkernel operating system, which is designed to unify block and file storage networking paradigms under a common architecture. The g4000 Gateway features a comprehensive suite of advanced data management capabilities to help you consolidate, protect, and recover mission-critical data for enterprise applications and users.