Tomorrow's networking environment will consolidate user-application traffic and storage-data traffic onto a single, high-performance, highly available network that has the built-in intelligence to identify different traffic types and handle them appropriately, according to pre-defined rules. The benefits of the concept are clear in terms of time, cost, skills and procurement, not to mention reduced cabling complexity. And although the path to getting there may at first seem steep, an incremental approach can ensure that the journey needn't cause unnecessary upheaval for the IT team and the end-users that they serve.