Oh, how quickly data can turn on you. Where once you had a nice neat system for storing your company data, you now have an unwieldy and complicated mesh of multiple-vendor apps, add ons and a lot more data than you bargained for. What's an IT manager to do?

There's hope for you yet - Symantec has a handy user's guide - From Chaos to Control: Mastering the Complexity of the Data Center. The guide details how your data center probably got into the state it's in, and what to focus on in order to unravel the mess. Here's what IT managers are saying top their list of issues:

- Automation
- Virtualization and grid computing
- Server and Storage Consolidation
- Storage Capacity Planning
- Performance and Control Monitoring
- Patching and Upgrades
- Systems Integration During Corporate Merger
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- Security Breaches
- ROI

To download Symantec's report, go to the Ziff Davis website.