The data center of the future is easy to visualize if you think back 25 – 35 years to the mainframe era.  The mainframes of old consisted of multiple processor complexes with local memory interconnected via multiple I/O channels to high speed (for then) storage and communications gateways.  They were managed by a centralized console and executed one or more control programs on each node (processor, I/O controller, etc.).

Modern data centers are rapidly evolving towards this architecture.  Probably because it works best. 

• Storage is specialized into network attached mass storage solutions accessing a high speed I/O channel (GigE, iSCSI, FC, etc.)
• I/O channels are increasingly looking like high speed switched networks with tag-switched Gigabit Ethernet as the inevitable winner.
• Servers are specializing into virtual machine hypervisors with gobs memory and multi-CPU cores per blade as the most cost effective specialization.
• Since CPUs are so fast, on-blade memory is the only viable answer.  Maximizing memory on each blade is also the most cost-effective way of provisioning general purpose hypervisors.
• Control programs are tucked into VMs loaded by a hypervisor.  Just like the old IBM-VM mainframe O/S that could run multiple operating systems including MVS (now known as MS-Windows) and Unix (now known as Linux).  VMs are necessary because most software development predates the Pentium IV and it’s hyperthreading capabilities (i.e. you can only go so far with multitasking & threading before it is just simpler to run a dedicated O/S per application and not have to worry about concurrency).
• Workload management is a necessary new thing for maximizing the value of distributed servers, but in the old days was simply an amazingly rich job schedular.  Enter SOA and workload orchestration solutions having uncanny workload scheduling similarities to those old job schedulars.
• Systems management must be centralized to a console, but the tired old agent-based server management solutions of the 20th century are not going to scale – principally because they are locked into the very VMs that they need to manage.  Enter an emerging class of agentless management solutions.