Jerry Bartlett, CIO at TD Ameritrade, said in a panel discussion I moderated last week that his company is almost exclusively an EMC shop. But he indicated that nothing is necessarily forever.

That exclusivity is "a bit problematic because it limits your choices," Bartlett acknowledged. "That is one of the inhibitors to flexibility. The day you can move to a more heterogeneous environment, then you can introduce true competitiveness."

But getting to that heterogeneous state requires storage vendors to fulfill their promise to deliver interoperable products, and Bartlett gave them a grade of C- on that score. Another member of the panel, Charles Inches, IT director at Corner Banca in Lugano, Switzerland, was less charitable. He gave the vendors a D.

"I'm very, very critical" of the vendors' track record on interoperability, he said. "Almost all the vendors are bunched up into the [Storage Networking Industry Association], but they're not delivering yet."

Inches was equally scathing in his assessment of storage vendors' pricing policies. Storage pricing is a "Turkish carpet bazaar," Inches said, responding to a question I posed on the transparency and sensibility of pricing practices. The panelists were especially critical of having to license storage management software on the basis of server capacity -- a practice that Fischer-Samano called "just outrageous."