Performance, reliability and virtualization capabilities top the list of what users want from their servers. They're also looking for an easier way to manage this pool of resources that are the cornerstones of business.

"Simply put, I want control of everything from anywhere regardless of the means of connection," says James Barry, CIO of OneUnited Bank in Boston. "Further, I want to be able to manage below the operating system, and I want to be able to dynamically allocate resources on the fly where needed."

What follows is a wish list for server vendors compiled from discussions with network professionals:

1. Standard architectures.

Companies are looking for the easiest, most cost-effective way to deploy servers without having to worry about training staff or integrating with existing systems. That means standard boxes.

"I am asking my vendors for a 'commodity' server. I don't want any special differentiating functionality other than reliability and cost - performance is a given," says Ulrich Seif, senior vice president and CIO at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara. "We evaluate our vendor offerings against our requirements and then select the best solution that can be deployed worldwide as a standard."

2. Distributed computing capabilities.

Users are tired of provisioning too much hardware and getting less than optimal use from their infrastructure. They want to be able to share resources on the fly, manage groups of servers and run applications with the best performance possible.

"Servers should become more bladed in nature, and those blades should be able to be combined into a single system," says an enterprise systems architect at a large financial organization who asked not to be named. "Say they are dual-processor blades: I could have a two-, four-, eight-, 16-, 32-, 128-processor system with the operating system actually virtualized across those blades."

To do that, servers will have to support technologies such as InfiniBand, a high-speed I/O switching fabric, he says.

"The data center itself would be nothing more than a grid of compute, storage and network resources," he says.

3. Virtualization.

More businesses are looking at virtualization as a way to consolidate servers, but some complain that Intel-based operating systems aren't mature enough when it comes to handling virtualized resources. W.L. Gore & Associates in Newark, Del., for example, is looking at VMWare as a way to virtualize its Intel-based machines.