More than ever before, the success of your business depends on the availability and performance of your business applications and the secure, flexible transport of information across your data center. However, many enterprise data centers are complex, siloed environments in which servers and storage equipment are under-utilized, cycle times for provisioning new applications are long, and operating costs -- especially power and cooling costs -- consume an ever-greater percentage of the IT budget. More and more organizations are turning to virtualization to address these issues. Unfortunately, many virtualization efforts do not deliver the expected results because they focus only on servers, failing to account for storage, network, and other critical resources.

Even though virtualization has been around for several years, only a small portion of operating system workloads has been virtualized today. Siloed organizations, with separate teams for applications, security, storage, servers, network, and facilities, present a complex environment for end-to-end approaches such as virtualization. Compounding the effects of organizational complexity, many customers struggle with understanding how virtualization will affect day-to-day operational and IT service management procedures.