Data center evolution

Data centers form a key part of the infrastructure upon which a variety of information technology services are built. As data centers continue to grow in size and complexity, it is desirable to understand aspects of their design that are worthy of carrying forward, as well as existing or upcoming shortcomings and challenges that would have to be addressed. We envision the data center evolving from owned physical entities to potentially outsourced, virtualized and geographically distributed infrastructures that still attempt to provide the same level of control and isolation that owned infrastructures do. We define a layered model for such data centers and provide a detailed treatment of state of the art and emerging challenges in storage, networking, management and power/thermal aspects.