More than a few IT people have been wondering how companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun and IBM would eventually respond the concept of a unified fabric that Cisco has been promoting as a vehicle for unifying computational and network computing assets in the data center.

Providing a glimpse of that response this week is Brocade, which both companies rely on to provide them with core Ethernet switch and network adapter technologies in the data center. The company has announced its intention to deliver a Brocade 8000 series Fibre channel switch that supports up to 24 10 Gigabit-per-second ports.

Most importantly, in a world where physical IT infrastructure is under continues assault by virtual machines looking for more resources, the Brocade announcement included two sets of adapters that can support up to 64 virtual data I/O queues by leveraging N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV).

The issue that IT organizations are going to find themselves dealing with over the next two years is as they increase the number of virtual machines on each server, the demands for more access to storage I/O increases. Unless IT organizations move to a complementary virtual network adapter approach, they would be forced to potentially deploy hundreds of physical adapters to support all the virtual servers running in their environments.

By taking a virtual approach to network adapters, IT organizations not only have a more efficient approach to managing I/O, they also gain the ability to manage quality of service levels and even encryption across each virtual connection.

The debate that the vendor community is split around is whether it is better to deal with these issues by upgrading to new systems that were specifically designed to handle these virtualization issues, or take a more evolutionary approach as personified by Brocade that allows IT organizations to migrate more slowly.

Right now, current economic conditions may favor the Brocade approach given the appetite for major system upgrades is relatively low these days. But over time, it's pretty clear IT organizations need a more economical approach to managing the data center. And when they finally do confront that issue, there going to find that the biggest issue is not the cost of system, but rather the cost of labor associated with hiring dedicated server, storage and networking specialists that are increasingly becoming obsolete in the data center.