Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist at eBay Research Labs in San Jose, said he is always "looking to lower the cost of our infrastructure," but any new hardware in his IT environment also risks adding yet another management layer. "A whole bunch of baggage comes in with it," he said.

Strong said he wants vendors to focus their development efforts on standardizing management software in order to map an application's use backend storage systems to help him determine the value of his infrastructure compared to its cost. "Then I can have a discussion with the CIO and say if you give me 10 percent more [money] this year, we can become a profit center as opposed to a cost center," he said.

Clyde Smith, senior vice president for broadcast engineering R&D at Turner Broadcasting Systems Inc., in Atlanta, said commoditized storage systems may have a place in his enterprise but manufacturers will first need to distinguish themselves in the marketplace through better software.

"Software applications need to be developed and sold integral with the storage needs, whether that be backup and replication or, for my needs, intelligent data management," Smith said. "So we're not just looking to drive cost down. Our most rapid growing expense item is our support cost," he said. "If there software applications make my staff vastly more efficient ... yeah, that would really interest us."

Ezequiel Rodriquez, director of corporate development for financial services at Telefonica Internacional SA in Miami, said he's watched the reduction in the overall cost of hardware that has allowed him to store more redundant copies of data in remote sites for disaster recovery. "I don't think people are putting as much attention on the total cost to run these things. For example, a fully-managed solution, you can't just go by the per terabyte price. It takes resources and software," he said. "They're not counting stuff like the cost of the data center space."