Server virtualization technologies for Linux have advanced at a rapid pace of innovation with VMware and Citrix initially leading the way. They are now being joined by significant strategic investments by Red Hat. Unfortunately, the storage side of the equation has lagged behind. Several trends, such as the explosion of unstructured data and the emergence of cloud computing, have shined a spotlight on the gap and woken many to the realization that it is holding the industry back from achieving a fully virtualized data center.