In years past IT managers were willing to be saddled with the dreaded vendor lock-in. They were willing to let their infrastructure and software choices be dictated by one or two vendors in the hope of better operation efficiency and support. Those days, however, are long gone. Most IT shops are platform and vendor neutral. But building a server architecture that can allow for true agnosticism is challenging. In this paper, learn five actionable ways your IT organization can leverage IBM's System X technology to build truly scalable and flexible data centers that can power any number of vendor systems and business processes and workloads.