Saravanan Krishnan, director, platforms & solutions business, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, shared with the audience a metric-based approach called storage economics that explores cost reduction opportunities within storage infrastructure.

"Price-per-TB is the wrong metric in making storage decisions. There are hidden costs everywhere including labour and maintenance," said Krishnan.

The process identifies some 34 types of costs, measures unit cost baselines, isolates direct and indirect costs and determines cost owners, and maps costs to investments that can reduce costs. Unit cost reduction and ROI can also be predicted.

The last presenter of the day, Subramaniam Venkatesan Balaji, storage practice leader, TS consulting, APJ region, HP, shared with the audience a case study on how US-based Ceva Logistics employed HP's 3PAR to consolidate various legacy storage systems.