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Being here in our Nation's Capital at this time of year, we're on the verge of dramatic changes.  I'm not talking about just the obvious changes coming November 4, but to Federal computing environments and their data centers as well. No question about it - change is coming at us from every angle. The list of considerations for change is long...perhaps most notably for Federal data centers, space is limited, power consumption and cooling requirements are on the rise, and complexity has never been higher or more of an impediment.  These events are moving most Federal agencies closer and closer to virtualization.  This isn't news in and of itself, but it's still noteworthy given that this is a sure sign that virtualization has gone past the point of "novel."  Most analysts agree that we're now well into the next phase of virtualization deployment. In a recent article in Government Computer News (GCN), a Federal survey polling nearly 300 executives saw most deploying server virtualization, and 33 percent implementing hypervisor technologies specifically to save energy. However, according to the survey conducted by Actionable Research, respondents said the technology was far from perfect.  Of those using virtualization, 24 percent have experienced a disappearance of virtual servers from their systems, and 18 percent reported having permanently lost a virtual server. Additionally, 45 percent of respondents said they had concerns about the lack of expertise that their IT staffers had with virtualization, and 44 percent said they were concerned that virtual servers could fail because of a component failure in a physical server. These aren't small issues...we're talking significant issues and percentages with significant failure costs associated with them. Add in the concerns about lack of experience - and the growing complexity of the data center - and it's a whole new world out there, so to speak. This is where change in the data center isn't a "nice to do" anymore - it's mandatory.  Solutions like our own PAN Manager software become even more valuable in times like these.  Federal - and really all - customers need to be able to create, manage, and monitor both physical and virtual environments easily and affordably.  Solutions where N+1failover and disaster recovery aren't just marketing catchphrases, but repeatable, verifiable and reliable approaches to guarantee up-time no matter what happens have never been more important. I suspect these are changes we can all get behind. What's on your list of changes to watch?