About five years ago, you couldn't pick up a trade magazine or speak to an IT professional without tripping across the subject of consolidation. Whether you were talking server, storage or data center--or any other realm of IT, for that matter--it seemed as if consolidation was on everyone's lips. And why not? All of these functional technology categories had morphed into distributed operational nightmares. Before long, there was an urgent need to clean up the mess. . . .

About five years ago, you couldn't pick up a trade magazine or speak to an IT professional without tripping across the subject of consolidation. Whether you were talking server, storage or data center--or any other realm of IT, for that matter--it seemed as if consolidation was on everyone's lips. And why not? All of these functional technology categories had morphed into distributed operational nightmares. Before long, there was an urgent need to clean up the mess.

Take storage as an example. Every server in the data center had its own spinning disks that needed to be monitored, backed up and maintained. With more servers entering the mix, demand increased for extra human resources, software tools and redundant tape drives. And as always, the IT operations team was left to manage this headache.

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