Speed is a lower priority

IBM's proposed long-term storage device may be more crucial for enterprises than will Storage Class Memory, said Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman. Many IT departments have more speed than they need, because they want to make sure storage access doesn't slow down applications. The bigger problem is how to deal with the data they need to keep for a long time, he said. That involves sunk costs in real estate and energy, as well as management.

"Being able to store a petabyte in 1U is going to be massively valuable," Reichman said.

However, the biggest challenge of the moment for most enterprises is knowing what data to put in what form of storage, for the benefit of application users, he said. Application and storage managers need to communicate better to make that possible.

"There's always going to be a faster bucket. ... But what will never change is that it's hard to organize your stuff," Reichman said.