Hewlett-Packard has fired back at Cisco in the increasingly contentious race to field an overarching data-center strategy, which will enable enterprises to rein in the complexity of sprawling networks and rampant virtualization.

Earlier this week, Cisco linked up with EMC and VMware in a partnership which tightly integrates storage alongside easy-to-manage virtualized data-center bundles called V-Blocks.

On Wednesday, HP unleashed its response. The computing powerhouse announced a converged infrastructure architecture, which essentially creates a one-stop data-center shop. It packages HP's compute, storage, networking offerings into a highly virtualized bundle which can be centrally managed. The server components are HP's BladeSystems.

While the dueling HP-Cisco intros are important in and of themselves, for CIOs what's of greater significance is what they say about where the metaphorical "head" of the industry is at. Namely, everyone is grappling with several competing, simultaneous, and incredibly complicated challenges.

Leading the list is the rapidly ramping number of virtualized server resources, which many enterprises have to struggle to manage. In typical environments, it's often difficult to discover all one's resources, let alone perform live migrations, when compute power has to be reallocated on the fly. Indeed, it's becoming a truism that migrating a virtual server can often cost as much money as buying a new physical box.

Then there's the aforementioned network sprawl, which results from the explosion of server instances, both physical and virtual. One can add to this the impetus to boost network speeds to 10-GB Ethernet and beyond. Also in the mix is the rapidly vanishing network perimeter, where the traditional, well-defined boundaries have been exploded in the face of geographically dispersed, occasionally connected mobile workers. The requirement to support such remote clients adds security worries (aka authentication) as another unpleasant to-do item to the already strained checklist of admins and CIOs.

And I haven't even mentioned cloud computing. The potential capital-expenditure savings promised by moving hosted apps into a SaaS model is making chief financial officers salivate. Their CIOs, in turn, now have to contend with a mashed up environment where, as a first level, apps are bring shifted into the cloud. But additional complexity lies ahead, as organizations are being forced to reenvision their entire networks as a mix of public cloud resources leased from the likes of Amazon, combined with on-premise private clouds.

That's the multivarient backdrop against which HP, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Juniper, and others are now duking it out.