Heterogeneous storage environments are expensive because organizations need support staff, procedures and training for each type of storage system they have, said Mark Shirman, president and CEO of GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a systems integrator and consulting company specializing in storage and based in Framingham, Mass. "If you've got 10 vendors, you've got 10 armies of people to take care of them," which is not scalable, he said.

While consolidating storage requires spending money in the short term, in the long run it can save organizations money by reducing the amount of staffing expertise and training required, Shirman said.

Several users at the conference said they were consolidating or had consolidated their SANs to achieve cost benefits. Patrick St.-Jacques, technical specialist for the Canada Revenue Agency, in Ottawa, said his organization had moved from a plethora of systems down to just IBM and EMC Corp. as the storage products in-house reached their end of life. The organization kept IBM because it uses IBM mainframes heavily and because the IBM contract still has two years to run, he said.

Last year, the Canada Revenue Agency issued a tender, which is like a request for proposals, looking for a single storage vendor and expecting to save money on storage hardware, St.-Jacques said. At the time, different groups in the agency had their own SANs, with separate staffs covering Unix hosts, Windows systems and the mainframe, he said. The staffs merged -- though individuals are still broken out between mainframe support and open systems support -- and the organization decided on an EMC DMX-3 with 750TB. That, combined with the IBM storage, brings the organization to more than a petabyte, he said.