Much of the overall performance of any given application is derived from the intricate dance that take place between servers functioning as the compute engine and storage arrays that provide the raw I/O throughput needed to serve up the data.

One of the challenges at the moment with the move to virtualization is that it adds another layer of software into the performance equation that essentially creates a divide between the server and storage architecture.

This issue has let a lot companies to adopt virtualization in area where performance is not a major issue, but when it comes to production systems there is still a lot of hesitation about virtualization.

Interestingly enough, you might have thought that IBM, Hewlett-Packard or even EMC, which owns VMware, stepping up to take this issue on given their respective strengths in servers and storage. Instead, the company that looks to be taking the first meaningful swipe at healing the server and storage virtualization divide is Symantec.

The new Veritas Virtual Infrastucture that Symantec rolled out this week combines the virtual server implementation from Citrix with virtualization server and storage management tools developed by Symantec. The basic idea here is that Symantec wants to let IT organization replicate the same tight coupling of servers and storage in the physical world across any number of virtual servers and storage arrays right down to the block level.

Symantec may have been able to tackle this issue first because it has always taken a software approach to storage and server management, as opposed to rivals that would need to upgrade firmware in hardware to deal with many of the same issues.

In addition, many people feel that VMware has embarked on a proprietary path in terms of how it integrates storage with virtual machines. There may be some validity in that approach but Symantec, Citrix and to a larger degree Microsoft are throwing their weight behind similar approaches. It's too early to say whether a standard will emerge here but de facto standards of one in the area of enterprise infrastructure never seem to turn out well for anybody.

Odds are good that we're going to hear a lot more about the convergence of virtual server and storage management in the months ahead. But until this issue gets resolved, it's hard to see how virtualization is going to emerge as the underpinning of new more flexible approach to IT no matter how much everybody hopes and expects. Kudos to Symantec for helping start the conversation.