A Systems Overview of Commercial Data Centers: Initial Energy and Cost Analysis

Data center facilities play a vital role in present and forthcoming information and communication technologies. Internet giants, such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon hold large data centers to provide cloud computing services and web hosting applications. Due to rapid growth in data center size and complexity, it is essential to highlight important design aspects and challenges of data centers. This article presents market segmentation of the leading data center operators and discusses the infrastructural considerations, namely energy consumption, power usage effectiveness, cost structure, and system reliability constraints. Moreover, it presents data center network design, classification of the data center servers, recent developments, and future trends of the data center industry. Furthermore, the emerging paradigm of mobile cloud computing is debated with respect to the research issues. Preliminary results for the energy consumption of task scheduling techniques are also provided.