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The time spent supporting aging IT architectures is orthogonal to the needs of today's fast-paced business environments. Granted, several newer technologies, such as converged and hyper-converged infrastructures, public and private clouds, and Hadoop- and Spark-based scale-out products and services are easing the situation. It's not enough, however. We want to spend more time developing new applications and little to no time managing IT infrastructures. Enter disaggregation. Separating an aggregate into its components isn't a new concept, but this approach is assuming greater importance. For IT, disaggregation means breaking a computer down to its core elements -- compute, memory, I/O, storage, cache, network fabric and so on -- to implement more-cost-effective, agile infrastructures and more-efficient storage allocation. But why do this now after a decade of aggregating IT resources through concepts like hyper-convergence? Scaling resources individually is often more-cost-effective than scaling them as combinations. The idea of...