Fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) is an emerging area of vertical integration of hardware and software infrastructure with automation on top, promised to assist IT organizations in realizing their visions of a dynamically optimized data center, which we term “real-time infrastructure.” It is being driven more from a vendor perspective today (versus a customer pull model) as vendors seek to take a larger share of the IT budget to meet their growth goals in an era of constrained IT budgets. The automation layer, at a minimum, focuses on automating infrastructure provisioning inclusive of server, storage and networking resources, inclusive of Internet Protocol (IP) address automation and storage naming, with some providers also focused on enabling hybrid cloud environments between their customers and service providers, and provisioning the software stack above the hypervisor and operating environments. FBI differs from fabric-based computing (FBC) by enabling existing technology elements to be grouped and packaged in a fabric-enabled environment to achieve a modicum of infrastructure convergence.