With a tool such as FAST or Automatic Data Relocation, most of that effort is saved.

"The front-runner of those choices seems to be automated data movement," Forrester's Reichman said. It's crucial because it will let the average enterprise achieve the efficiency and savings they are after with flash, he said. In fact, he believes the wait for more automation software is holding back demand for flash storage.

"Auto tiering is the way to go," said analyst Henry Baltazar of The 451 Group. "It's too much of a pain to micromanage all those different workloads." He believes applications themselves will eventually do much of the work of assigning data to different tiers, but first there need to be standards across the industry so they can talk to different vendors' infrastructure, he said. The Storage Networking Industry Association is one organization working toward such standards. For now, it's up to individual vendors, he said.

In any automatic system, sub-LUN capability will be crucial, the analysts said. Because SSDs are much more expensive than HDDs, per bit, it makes no sense to store an entire database on flash just because some of it is frequently accessed.

"Putting a whole LUN on an SSD means that you really have the likelihood of wasting it," Reichman said. "It still is a 10X cost differential."