The face of network-attached storage (NAS) is changing. Enterprise IT shops are increasingly seeking out the latest wave of scale-out NAS systems that better support file I/O-intensive applications and scale to multipetabytes of data under a single system image. Meanwhile, small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are contemplating testing cloud-based file storage.

In this podcast interview transcript, Terri McClure, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, shares her predictions that the majority of data storage will be scale-out within a few years and that the cloud is rapidly emerging as a NAS tier.