As private clouds gain traction, the industry will see continuing strong momentum for virtualizing mission-critical applications sourced from key suppliers such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Virtualization is at the core of an efficient, manageable private cloud infrastructure. While the initial driver to virtualize has been cost savings, increasingly the focus is on improvements to performance, service quality, and availability. What IT organizations have come to realize is that the underlying infrastructure, particularly storage, plays a key role in successfully realizing the benefits of a virtualized environment that supports enterprise applications.