A lot of network and storage solution vendors are promoting the idea of the file area network (FAN). This global, distributed information services network operates at the file level to provide authorised end users with visibility and access rights to any file stored depending on its content and business value.

Although only loosely defined so far and open to individual vendor interpretation, the FAN generally assumes that file access should be independent of specific applications. It should be managed via some kind of file namespace, whether shared or not, that sits above SAN or NAS devices to provide an index of the information it contains and an indication of the importance to the
organisation owning it, together with automated user authentication and control mechanisms.

Brad O’Neill, an analyst with storage research specialist Taneja Group, believes the fundamental advantage of the FAN is to give enterprise IT managers much tighter control over file information based on metadata and content – wherever it happens to be stored.

“If these capabilities sound vaguely familiar in their scope and impact, it is because the FAN is to traditional file management what the SAN was to direct-attached storage: a massive step function up in capabilities, control and ROI,” O’Neill commented.

The result, O’Neill believes, will be significant cost savings due to the consolidation of redundant file resources. In other words, this will eliminate the need to store duplicate copies of files in multiple locations and will give end users the means to access, back up or restore information from their own desktops without involving the IT department.

Unstructured data specialist Acopia Networks feels its approach to the FAN is more comprehensive and more global in nature than those being proposed by others such as InfoStor and Brocade, said Kirby Wadsworth, the company’s senior vice-president for marketing and business development.

“We feel it critical that the FAN include a virtualisation layer, giving any user a single point of entrance, that it include real-time [access] policy enforcement and that it can support any storage infrastructure that it finds,” Wadsworth said.

Acopia’s FAN infrastructure will progress from this year’s simplified file management, which includes established storage technologies like tiering, data migration, load balancing and replication, to enhanced service delivery through indexing, classification, de-duplication, application acceleration, capacity optimisation and security in 2007. Acopia hopes that by 2008 it will have achieved the goal of truly integrated global information management based on application integration, business intelligence, data protection and conformance.

“This is what Acopia and other file system virtualisation vendors have been striving for from the start,” said Tony Asaro, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “FAN just becomes a new way of talking and thinking about it.”

Acopia offers a value-add, Asaro said, in the form of an intelligent switch that provides a software-rich, high-performance platform that enables a global name space for CIFS (Common Internet File System) and NFS (Network File System).

It also provides a set of data management capabilities that support heterogeneous storage and file systems, allowing the system to scale to any environment and provide all of the necessary capabilities to implement a FAN, added Wadsworth.

Although other vendors have been talking about achieving a unified file management strategy, Acopia may earn first-mover advantage, reckons Dave Russell, research vice-president for storage technologies and strategies at Gartner. “There is a lot of opportunity, due to the absence of large vendors like EMC, IBM and NetApp, but others will make moves into the market over time,” he said.