SRM, which provides the means of collecting information on heterogeneous resources, would benefit from standardization, too. SRM suffers from its inability to span virtualized environments from multiple vendors. This poses severe challenges for IT teams trying to troubleshoot performance issues. "You need deeper SRM integration to track application-performance problems back to specific spindle bottlenecks," ESG's Peters says.

SRM tools coupled with a virtualized environment create a roadblock to compliance, Nemertes' Ritter adds. When a company couples storage-resource and path-management tools with virtualization, "there is a lack of visibility into exactly what application data resides on which specific disk," he says.

This is a problem for organizations held to government and private-sector mandates. "If you can't tell where patient records are physically located [because they've been virtualized], then you're not [compliant with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act]. The need to account for data is fundamental," he says.

The abstraction of the physical layer also affects disaster recovery and business continuity efforts. "When you remove the physical connection to where a given piece of data is and introduce virtualization that remaps the location of the data, breaks it up into components, fakes out the server, etc., you wind up relying on metadata and virtualization mechanisms to retain access to critical data," Forrester's Reichman says.

To counterbalance this, IT teams should develop policies about which data can be stored where and should use monitoring technology to generate virtualization-aware audits on that data, Reichman advises.

Thin provisioning can be a great benefit, but it can lull IT executives into a false sense of security. And this can result in disaster, Nemertes' Ritter warns. "There is a potential for underprovisioning your storage network to support system failures," he says.

As they wait for these virtualization industry growing pains to subside, Mercury and other companies continue to pine for a utility future. "For Mercury to consider storage a utility, we'd have to have an environment that is fully integrated between the operating system, the file system and the block level. That way, when an application needs more storage, the virtualized environment would automatically increase the resources and send a message back to the server," Kreisa says. "That's the endgame, and it's still a ways out."