Today's mission-critical storage environments require greater consistency, predictability, and performance to keep pace with growing business demands. Faced with explosive data growth, data centers need more I/O capacity to accommodate the massive amounts of data, applications, and workloads. In addition to this surge in data, collective expectations for availability continue to rise. Users expect applications to be available and accessible from anywhere, at any time, on any device. To meet these dynamic and growing business demands, organizations need to deploy and scale up applications quickly. As a result, many are moving to higher virtual machine (VM) densities to enable rapid deployment of new applications and deploying flash storage to help those applications scale to support thousands of users. To increase agility, reduce expenses, and realize the full benefits of these architectures, organizations need the network to deliver the performance required by today's server and storage environments. In addition, storage networks are becoming increasingly important to application performance, which means that they also must become easier to administer and manage. By treating the network as a strategic part of a highly virtualized environment, organizations can increase optimization and efficiency even as they rapidly scale their environments.