NAS gateways can be a practical solution for optimizing installed storage capacity, but they're used by only 30% of the respondents to our recent survey. The No. 1 reason for choosing the technology over separate NAS filers was excess capacity on a Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI storage array. Apparently, a lot of our NAS gateway users have unused high-end storage hanging around--64% of them connect their NAS gateways to Tier 1 FC storage on the back end. And 27% hook the gateways to older Tier 2 (or lower) FC storage. Of those not using NAS gateways, 30% have plans to implement gateways in the next two years. --Christine Cignoli