Adaptive Internet Data Centers

Trends in Internet infrastructure indicate that organizations with mission-critical needs are outsourcing applications to a small number of Internet data center providers. These providers operate networks and services at a global scale, and offer customers (and other service providers) a variety of services ranging from high bandwidth networking to fullfledged application hosting and IT management services. These global service providers offer their services through large data centers. Each will eventually contain 10,00050,000 servers with high-speed network connections to other data centers and the Internet. The large scale and rapid evolution of these data centers offers significant challenges for the data center operators. This paper describes issues that face data centers as they scale in size and our current research to support such scalability. It explains our approach to: introduce greater numbers of applications into these environments, support automated management, and make it attractive for organizations to outsource the hosting of greater numbers of applications.