"It's a logical evolution," said Bill Mahoney, a network architect for the U.S. Air Force at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass., during the EMC World user conference in Boston last week.

On the other hand, "I don't see the natural fit to bring that all under one umbrella," said John Hegner, vice president of technology services at Liberty Medical Supply Inc., a user of EMC Corp. storage products in Port Saint Lucie, Fla.

"We have separate tools to manage our network and to manage our storage. I think the skill set and the tools to manage each product are different, and I don't see the big value of bringing them together," Hegner said.

Liberty Medical uses EMC's Navisphere storage management software and EPICenter network management products from Extreme Networks Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif.

Meanwhile, several big storage vendors have disclosed plans to offer integrated storage and network management tools over the next year or two.