Jerry Bartlett, CIO at TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. in Omaha, said he advocates that his company be vendor-agnostic but acknowledged that it's almost exclusively an EMC shop.

"That's problematic, because it limits your choices [and is an] inhibitor to flexibility. The day you can move to a more heterogeneous environment, then you can introduce true competitiveness" and lower prices, he said.

The panelists were also critical of vendors' efforts to build interoperable storage products.