"Network administrators don't know anything about disk drives," he said. "This is a dangerous vision: having to reinvent yourself every 10 years. This is about the separation of church and state."

The audience member was also angry about what he saw as bloated prices for host bus adapter (HBAs) cards, which are network interface cards for Fibre Channel traffic.

HBAs can cost anywhere from the high hundreds of dollars to more than $1,000 each. And yet, as the storage administrator pointed out, "they're no different than NICs."

"They're just silicon on a board," he said.

"In my opinion, I think the greatest hurdle to converged networks is politics," said Jason Beckham, vice president of IT for Payformance, an electronic healthcare claims settlement service provider.