Penn said FANs are to traditional file management what SANs were to direct-attached storage.

Brocade Australia and New Zealand country manager Graham Schultz said the development of the FAN mirrors the SAN life cycle.

"The FAN is in the same evolutionary period as SANs were six years ago; the technology is here but there will still be a lag in adoption from a lack of market awareness," Schultz said.

"CFOs need to verify that backup in remote sites has been done, so backup from a centralized database is a lot more controlled than something that could be done in a regional office using a piece of masking tape during the last half hour of a shift."

IDC's Penn said the global advent of compliance laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Japan's J-SOX will force industry to implement better storage layouts like FAN.