Todd Thomas, CIO of Austin Radiological Association PA, said his biggest concern now is the cost of maintaining storage equipment.

"It would be cheaper for us to go into a new SAN environment than to continue maintenance on existing equipment," he contended. However, Thomas said that replacing the company's storage infrastructure isn't necessary, so he plans to work on better controlling maintenance costs.

Charles Inches, IT director of Corner Banca SA in Lugano, Switzerland, said that resource management is the company's greatest storage cost. "It's managing all this stuff that's becoming a nightmare -- cost-wise, organizational-wise, standards-wise," Inches said.

At some point, as the distinction between production and nonproduction data blurs, all corporate users need to be involved in protecting corporate data and thus must have access to storage management tools, he said. "Nowadays, [even] e-mail is becoming production data," Inches noted.

The IT executives also said they aren't fond of capacity-based licensing of storage management software. "It should come bundled with your hardware," Thomas said.