Despite the economic environment, uptime, scalability and security are critical to the process of building and maintaining cost-effective network infrastructure solutions for "smart" data centers. There are options available that can help IT professionals bypass the budget tug-o-war that frequently halts IT projects.

Virtualization is one such option. It is fast becoming a popular technology choice that, in many cases, enables IT personnel to balance data center demand and performance requirements with budget constraints. However, to achieve those benefits, collaborative planning efforts are a must. Specifically, discussions around the physical layer are critical to launching virtualization within any organization, as you need to ensure your physical infrastructure is designed to support bandwidth, power, cooling and other requirements virtualization brings along with it.