By Leon Erlanger

Has the once staid and boring data center become exciting enough to have "2.0" added to its name? It certainly seems that way. A growing number of IT leaders are thrilled to describe the dramatic cost savings and agility they've achieved through data center virtualization and automation.

Discussing plans for his organization's data center, David Brattain, Senior VP of Global Systems, Networking, Enterprise IT Management, and Production Support at Elavon Inc., enthuses, "[Our plans are] huge, a quantum leap from where we are today."

"We're really pushing the envelope," adds Dee Cantrell, CIO of Emory Healthcare, the largest healthcare system in the southeastern U.S., talking about her data center. "If I have to run a new application, I can simply create a space on a blade and get a new server up and running in minutes, not hours."

For IT leaders like Brattain and Cantrell, the data center has become the major center for cost-cutting and agility in the enterprise. CIOs are quickly latching onto virtualization as a way to consolidate operations; slash hardware, management and power costs; and jump-start disaster-recovery capabilities. Now organizations are moving to the next step: automation, which promises even more dramatic efficiencies and agility gains. "Companies are looking to automate certain mundane tasks, such as server provisioning, so their staffs can spend more time on more complex tasks, such as process improvement for better service delivery," says Evelyn Hubbert, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research.