Just about everybody agrees the convergence of server, network and storage technologies is going to happen on some level in the data center. But nobody is exactly sure to how fast it will happen or for that matter to what degree.

In a Future o Enterprise IT: the Business Impact of Converged IT webinar sponsored by EMC, an initial attempt is made to sort out these issues.

The panel consists of Dave Vallante, chief research advocate for Wikibon, Phil Little, enterprise storage engineer and architect for Pacific Corp, David Floyer, chief technology officer for Wikibon and Dennis Martin, who works primarily for the Demartek Testing Lab.

The wide-ranging discussion focuses a lot more on technology issues than business implication. Nevertheless, the participant do touch on a range of interesting networking and storage issues related to data center convergence, especially when it comes to the future of Fibre Channel storage.

As the participant point out, data center convergence is going to be roughly the equivalent of “traversing a minefield.” Unfortunately, this discussion only identifies a handful of the known minefields and doesn’t do much in the way of helping to figure out how actually defuse any of them.

A more detailed set of webinars on the impact of convergence in the data center can be found here.

Rating: A decent attempt at opening eyes to the potential of data center convergence.