Enabling technologies for future data center networking: a primer

Abstract

The increasing adoption of cloud services is demanding the deployment of more data centers. Data centers typically house a huge amount of storage and computing resources, in turn dictating better networking technologies to connect the large number of computing and storage nodes. Data center networking (DCN) is an emerging field to study networking challenges in data centers. In this article, we present a survey on enabling DCN technologies for future cloud infrastructures through which the huge amount of resources in data centers can be efficiently managed. Specifically, we start with a detailed investigation of the architecture, technologies, and design principles for future DCN. Following that, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that should be addressed for future DCN to improve its energy efficiency and increase its throughput while lowering its cost.