You know, I hate to tell you this, right when this virtualization thing was going so well for technology users, but whatever virtualization projects you're working on right now won't end when you finish building out the storage area network (SAN) and VM server farm. Not by a long shot.

Sure, you already know there will be follow-on projects. You'll have to add some level of desktop virtualization, probably for departments that have pretty low demands on IT anyway (and probably not much pull with upper management, either, but that's another issue). You'll have to virtualize some apps, beef up your network backbone to handle the additional traffic, and upgrade your systems and network management to keep your VMs and PMs (physical machines) on track.

You'll also want to look at data-leak prevention, VM-specific access control, backup and storage management; VM-enabled business continuity, maybe.

If you're optimistic you might spec out the full virtualization picture --in which the network, file system, storage and applications are all virtualized and controlled by a kind of IT-manager-as deus ex machina, shifting resources and capacity around behind the scenes while end users work blithely on without knowing where any single one of the bits they manipulate lives or why.

Undoubted optimist, IT storage analyst and former integrator George Crump who— aside from an unfortunate tendency to capitalize IT End User and view storage as the axis on which the IT world revolves—sees that universal virtualization as a logical, if challenging, final goal of major virtualization projects.

But after all that work—flooding the IT infrastructure with abstraction layers until the whole company floats on an ocean of virtualization, high above its data and computing gear—users are still going to complain they can't do things with the data that you've made it so simple to access.

Virtualization projects are IT architecture improvements, but good architecture doesn't always make for good buildings.

Uber-architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, is famous for building beautiful houses scaled to his own diminutive height, so that inhabitants taller than 5' 9" either walk around stooped, or with door-lintel-shaped lumps in their heads.

That's roughly the position you'd be putting end users in if you restructure your infrastructure, but leave the data as is. End users would be able to get at data so easily, they'll immediately wonder why they can't do more with it.

It's the most basic problem in IT, and the most dull.

Forget virtualization. Data formats, database structures, data restrictions, incompatible applications and quilts of middleware are the real IT infrastructure of any company.