Increasingly demanding IT requirements are necessitating change to the data center network. The amount of data that is being collected is increasing and changing, organizations are finding new ways to analyze, evaluate, and use the information that they collect. Hardware trends are making it cost effective to capture new information sources and to automate data management. In the hardware arena especially, falling prices and increasing capacity for memory devices are reshaping the storage industry. Solid-state drives, large amounts of RAM, and new I/O technologies influence raw system performance. Read this paper to learn how system virtualization can improve the utilization of hardware, software, net-working and storage resources.