"Whether I have Sun or IBM or whatever storage I have, I"m trying to bring them all together and reduce the costs," Hussain said.

He also said he doesn"t believe that virtualization can erase interoperability issues in multivendor storage architectures. "Everyone"s saying we can work with everyone else, but they"re just sales people. I need to investigate it further, and if it doesn"t fit, I need to go back and see what I can have with this island of storage or that island of storage," he said.

SNW is sponsored by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association and runs through Thursday.