Don Tennant, editor-in-chief of Computerworld, led the panel discussion, asking four top-level IT managers what was driving high costs of storage in their operations.

Todd Thomas, CIO of Austin Radiological Association in Austin, said his primary cost concern is the maintenance of storage equipment. "Looking at the current maintenance dollars presented to us, it would be cheaper for us to go into a new SAN environment than to continue maintenance on existing equipment," he said.

But Thomas said his company doesn't need to update its infrastructure, so his challenge over the next year is how to control maintenance costs.

Charles Inches, IT director of Corner Banca, in Lugano, Switzerland, said managing his storage infrastructure has been his greatest cost. "It's managing all this stuff that's becoming a nightmare -- cost wise, organizational wise, standard wise," Inches said.

At a certain point, he said, all users need the proper management tools to safeguard all data since there's no longer a clear distinction between production and non-production data "...Nowadays [even] e-mail is becoming production data."