There are numerous roadblocks preventing optimal handling of data, from aging equipment to lack of mobility and low storage utilization rates, noted speaker Jack Domme, COO of Hitachi Data Systems. Complicating matters is the poor economy, which has business executives demanding spending reductions.

Costs can be reduced significantly by improving data mobility with storage virtualization, use of thin provisioning and lower-cost storage tiers, as well as de-duplication and archival of "stale" data that's rarely accessed, Domme said.

"We all know our utilization rates of our assets, our data and our storage are fairly low," he said. "Everywhere I go [people say] the key is utilization increase."

It's also crucial not to store redundant copies of data, Wayne Adams, an EMC official and chairman of the Storage Networking Industry Association, said in an interview. This requires a close accounting of data and metadata with tagging and search capabilities, allowing all copies of a given piece of data to be deleted at the end of its lifecycle, he said.

While many of these measures can be deployed immediately, Xiotech CEO and president Casey Powell predicted a complete revamping of how storage is organized and allocated in the coming years.

The storage-area network won't provide the flexibility needed in the future, Powell said. Applications themselves must be able to control their own storage resources, automatically provisioning and de-provisioning storage as needed, Powell said. "We need a system that is integrated to the point that the application, in conjunction with the operating system, controls its own destiny," he said. This will reduce the potential of human error and let storage pros focus on higher-level tasks, he said.

Powell acknowledged this will be difficult, particularly when it comes to creating applications that can control unstructured data.

"If you allow humans to control the system, it becomes cumbersome to the point where it probably won't work," he said. Some applications are self-provisioning storage today, but wholesale changes will take time.

"In 2020 we can come back here and see what's actually happened," Powell said in response to an audience member who asked for more details on how application-controlled storage will work. "The reality is we start small. ... We're not going to do a massive, across-the-board change in a short period of time."