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) while continuing 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 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 business solutions that require NAS-shared data access and remote access.The IBM System Storage N7000 Gateway product line is a network-based unified storage solution designed to provide Internet Protocol (IP) and Fiber Channel (FC) protocol access to Storage Area Network (SAN) attached heterogeneous storage arrays. The N7000 Gateway can help you leverage the dynamic provisioning capabilities of Data ONTAP software across your existing Fiber Channel SAN infrastructure to support an expanded set of business applications. The IBM N7000 Gateway is based on the Data ONTAP microkernel operating system, which is designed to unify block and file storage networking paradigms under a common architecture. The N7000 Gateway is designed to provide a comprehensive suite of advanced data management capabilities to help you consolidate, protect and recover mission-critical data for enterprise applications and users.The IBM N series Gateway is designed to deliver the performance and capacity to meet access requirements for enterprises of all sizes. N series Gateway systems are intended to deliver industry-leading performance, offer terabytes of managed capacity, and can be configured for simultaneous active/active access with secure failover across two independent systems in a cluster. N7000 Gateways can offer massive SAN and NAS consolidation is now a reality using multiple N7000 Gateway systems and SAN storage systems configured in a scalable SAN infrastructure.