Traditionally, NAS systems have had limitations in throughput, connectivity, reliability and scalability. As a result, mission critical storage tasks still required a SAN. Today, a new generation of high-performance NAS systems promises to overcome past limitations, bringing SAN-type features and capabilities to file-based storage. This special report reviews current NAS trends including high-availability clustered storage to address growing storage needs and today's media-rich file environments, the pros and cons of NAS with VMware, and so much more.