We are all familiar with the schism between hype and reality. For example, your favorite baseball team signs a hyped prospect who scouts are projecting will be “the next Mays,” but unfortunately, he winds up hitting more like Shirley Mays than Willie Mays and is never heard from again.

High throughput, low latency, network availability, reliability, and security have always been top priorities in data centers, but the recent wave of technological advances — autonomous cars, augmented reality, 5G, and all other connected objects of the Internet of Things (IoT) — are taking those priorities to a new level and bringing new challenges to IT systems administrators and data centers managers.