Andrew Warfield, the session chairman for the economics track that Wachs' talk was part of, noted that the presentation was one aspect of a larger challenge now being faced by cloud providers, namely the task of examining current operational practices in a deeper, more complex way in order to offer simpler, less expensive services to their customers.

Existing cloud storage metrics "are appealing from a customer-facing standpoint as the right way to market the whole system," Wachs said. "But you need to have something in the long term that will actually match the cost for the provider," he said.

The IDG News Service