However, organizations that have consolidated said they haven't necessarily seen the financial savings promised to them by vendors because users see the upgrades as an opportunity to request more storage or be more profligate with the storage they have. For example, departments that had used Sun Microsystems Inc. servers with 600GB asked for 1TB on the SAN, St.-Jacques said. In general, users were asking for one-third more storage than they already had, he said.

In fact, the 750TB that the organization purchased -- which was supposed to last three years -- is going to be used up in March, halfway through that period, St.-Jacques said. In addition, he has had to educate some departments that they still needed to perform file maintenance such as deletion and archiving even though the organization had bought all that storage, he said.

Brice said he is having the same experience and is having to double the 3TB his organization originally purchased.