Every IT manager is tasked with gaining efficiencies across the data center and IT infrastructure while providing the business agility to react to changing demands, ultimately moving the data center from a cost center to a competitive weapon. IT organizations are looking for virtualization technologies to increase utilization levels, improve staff efficiency while reducing space, power, and cooling needs.

While virtualization technology has improved IT efficiency and made server consolidation possible, it has also created many challenges. Traditional virtualized infrastructures can be complex, difficult, and time consuming to scale. Network ownership may be split between network and server administrators. Security may take a back seat to application mobility. And the massive number of virtual machines these environments spawn can tax server, network, and storage administrator resources.

In our IT Briefing featuring Gartner research, George J. Weiss and Valdis Filks discuss how the broadening cloud and fabric requirements are forcing redefinition of the server, where procurement plans and processes need to recognize servers not as fixed and finite objects, but as virtualized resources and mobile instances. The brief also includes material that highlights why the Cisco UCS platform is built to support virtualized environments, with a simplified and secure architecture that reduces costs, accelerates deployment, increases flexibility, and enables massive scalability.

The data center is at the heart of IT and business innovation and the infrastructure you choose to offer greater agility and flexibility while the lowering total cost of ownership really does matter.