Today’s business environment is more challenging than ever before. Market conditions are subject to rapid change and compliance and regulation issues continue to be more demanding on IT.

Within the data center, new composite applications are driving Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web 2.0 initiatives that require unprecedented levels of information access and sharing - and almost entirely unpredictable data growth.

The goal of this paper is to outline some of the challenges facing IT and help to provide recommendations to transform their data centers from today’s complex, “silo” or “stovepipe” collections of infrastructure into streamlined, dynamic, liquid engines capable of handling growth.