Research analyst Andreas Antonopoulos identifies best-of-breed tools for the next-generation data center.

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Andreas Antonopoulos, Network World, 10/24/05

By now we're all well versed on the attributes of the "new data center," characterized by service-oriented applications running over a virtualized service-oriented infrastructure. This next-generation data center brings the benefits of agility, lower operational costs, better utilization and rapid application deployment.

Architecturally, a next-generation data center relies on commoditized pools of resources that can be combined to support a variety of applications. This architecture applies to the four critical pillars of data center infrastructure: management, storage, computing and networking. But how can organizations transform their data centers to the next-generation model? The trick lies in translating this vision into a series of discrete, incremental steps - a road map, in other words. The road map comprises four major steps: consolidation, standardization, virtualization and utility.