So, you map top-down—where am I not meeting the needs of the business? Then map bottom-up—what do I physically have and how's it all working? Then apply real-time user experience and, then, guess what you have the ability to do? You have the ability to optimize on a broad basis incrementally and quickly.

How do you convince IT to move from the tactical approach to virtualization?

It can be tough. But what is IT in business to do? It's in business to deliver and constantly improve service. IT executives who are committed to doing more with less and doing more better, can in a very simple, three-step process, using commonsense dialog and best-in-class tooling, start to radically drive useful virtualization strategies and create the virtual data center.

And the other pieces, like the network and storage—how do they fit in?

Network, server, storage, disk, application components, data components—these all make up a service unit. [An enterprise application-virtualization platform like DataSynapse's] FabricServer understands what that service unit is and what's being asked of the demand side, and matches it.

Do you still have to create your virtual-LAN partitions for the network and [virtual logical-unit-numbers] for storage? Yes. Those capabilities are provided with your standard networking tools; you've got to turn them on so they're being consumed as a virtual service-unit. You can do that with the legacy stuff. That's the beauty of it. You can actually do more, faster because you're not causing the performance problems that traditional virtual-machine partitioning does.

You mention several products—DataSynapse's FabricServer, OpTier's CoreFirst and Tideway's Foundation. What other virtualization products, companies or trends are you watching?

When you get into the service unit, you have to figure out how to manage all of that, in a consistent, life-cycle way. So, you have tools like Scalent [Systems' Virtual Operating System software], Cisco's VFrame and FastScale [Technology's Composer and Virtual Manager] that are combining compute, storage, the operating system and the application build, and doing infrastructure repurposing. You've got to track this evolving area and think, 'Which one am I going to adopt as a second phase?' You've got to be really, really smart with your whole management and design approach when you start repurposing an entire infrastructure.

You'll also see network equipment providers like Cisco start to put more infrastructure into the switches themselves because then creating a logical abstraction is even easier. If everything is in one place, then I have less that I have to connect physically to make logical. Remember, virtualization is a precursor to cloud computing-enhanced services anywhere in the network can be consumed and provisioned based on what's being asked.