Cloud computing environments with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources require an elastic infrastructure that can be rapidly scaled and dynamically reconfigured. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. The alternate approach to infrastructure that virtualization has enabled, referred to as the software-defined data center, uses standard, commodity, scale-out hardware building blocks to create pools of resources. These resources are abstracted and delivered as tiers of services that can be configured, managed and controlled entirely through software. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally incompatible with the dynamic software-defined data center.