Christodoulou says NAS take-up is on the rise, especially among growing enterprises, "It is a very easy migration - they can add storage on the fly. They are now also using NAS for disaster recovery and EDR (Enterprise Data Replication) to allow replication from one site to the other."

Greg Wyman, consultant with StorageCraft, says one of the key reasons NAS adoption is growing is the technology's ability to reduce or eliminate most of the problems associated with traditional tape backup, such as lengthy backup windows, the complexity and cost of traditional tape software, and reliability.

"NAS is ideal as an image repository or backup repository regimen for disk to disk backup," Wyman says. "Traditional tape backup systems are struggling to meet today's business needs. Using NAS as a component in your backup and recovery strategy helps to substantially ease the complexity and improve performance, and reduce the total cost of ownership of a backup solution, making it more affordable. NAS are plug and play, they are very simple to install and implement and very easy to use."

NAS can also help eliminate backup problems in remote locations. A company could put a small NAS equipped with disk-to-disk backup software at a remote site and replicate the data over the WAN to head office. Once the data reaches the central depository it can be archived onto tape at the company's leisure.

NAS backup file restoration also makes life easier for IT administrators. The time it takes to restore files is reduced to only minutes with a disk-to-disk system, compared to 2-6 hours using traditional tape backup.