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There are a number of challenges facing data center managers today – not just the sudden curtailment of investments due to the economic situation.  Data centers are in the midst of one of the largest transformations in decades.  The shift is driven by more than just new technology.  New business models that extend corporate systems to include partners and suppliers; the redefinition of traditional IT organization models and processes; social computing; and new expectations of how IT will support corporate decision making are just a few of the disruptors.  Boil that all down and what you've got is a data center manager constantly managing not enough floor space, skyrocketing electricity bills and heat, rampant VM sprawl and pressures to contain costs while improving customer service levels.  While most data centers are juggling all this, I think we can agree that this dog just doesn't hunt. It's neither sustainable nor scalable. The move to a reliable dynamic data center is a way to a more sustainable model. Notice I didn’t say vision - it’s much more real than slideware.  So what is a reliable dynamic data center? I like the definition set forth by the Burton Group.   Together with one our OEM partners, we're defining the building blocks of a reliable dynamic data center. I consider the reliable dynamic data center a model that leverages the adoption of virtualization that’s already happened (server virtualization).  Because without it, companies can't achieve the agility, flexibility and reliability needed to evolve. And not evolving isn't an option, right? Server virtualization was the building block.  Cost reduction is what drove that step into mainstream adoption. The side benefit of the adoption of hypervisors and other forms of virtualization was that it allowed companies to move on to the second building block – improving quality of service.  Advanced adopters of virtualization realized that it positively impacted their ability to meet SLAs along with making it easier to automate provisioning, high availability and disaster recovery.  The third building block is improving agility, speed, efficiency and optimization through application workload consolidation. By automating dynamic allocation and balancing computing resources via automated business policies along with unified fabrics, standardized management interfaces, orchestration engines and IT governance, companies are firmly on the path to achieving a reliable dynamic data center. Unifying the management of physical and virtual infrastructure today is one cornerstone of the ‘data center of the future’. What are your thoughts? What are your building blocks?