Storage has become an anchor holding back progress in the modern, virtualized data center. Until recently, it has been slow, unpredictable and inflexible, requiring far too much operational overhead. Storage capacity and performance are often still locked together in fixed ratios, making it inevitable that even the best-run storage environments will be wasteful and inefficient. While compute and networking have evolved to keep pace with today’s business and IT needs, storage has historically been a limiting factor as a less-flexible component of the data center and a roadblock to guaranteeing storage performance to every virtual machine.