The 1,300 "citizens" of Colonial Williamsburg who work at the pre-Revolutionary War history museum might be living in the past. But the roughly 2TB of data and multimedia files they created last year to help serve tourists and history buffs is a modern-day challenge for the foundation's IT department.

"We could never get users to own up to doing any kind of life-cycle maintenance on their files… even though half of the data in their directions hadn't been used in more than 180 days," says Sean Maisey, manager of IT operations and engineering. “If we just allowed users to save files and not manage it in any way, we were on the road to needing another [2TB Network Appliance] FAS250 appliance every year.”

Maisey last year began addressing the problem by installing a file-area network (FAN), a newfangled counterpart to a storage-area network (SAN). Whereas SANs handle block-level data, such as from database management systems, FANs deal with unstructured data, such as Word files, spreadsheets, digital images and PDF files.