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Cloud storage may be hot, but good old NAS arrays -- stand-alone and hybrid deployments -- are more than holding their own in today's data center. Beige Market Intelligence forecast, for example, that the global NAS market will grow to $44 billion by 2021, at a compound annual growth rate of about 24% annually. A healthy, if not thriving, market if ever there was one. A number of factors are leading organizations to buy new NAS arrays. According to our surveys, more than half of respondents are looking to improve the performance of existing applications with a NAS upgrade, followed by about 40% whose main aim is to replace aging hardware. Other important factors include adding new storage systems to better support virtual servers and specific applications, a backup target, an additional tier to their storage environment, gain access to advanced storage management features and for deploying mass storage for branch/remote offices. Of course, the top factor they are considering when evaluating NAS vendors is price (80%) followed by...