Data center design is a tedious and expensive process. Recently, this process has become even more challenging as users of cloud services expect to have guaranteed levels of availability, durability and performance. A new challenge for the service providers is to find the most cost-effective data center design and configuration that will accommodate the users ’ expectations, on ever-changing workloads, and constantly evolving hardware and software components. In this paper, we argue that data center design should become a systematic process. First, it should be done using an integrated approach that takes into account both the hardware and the software interdependencies, and their impact on users ’ expectations. Second, it should be performed in a “wind tunnel”, which uses large-scale simulation to systematically explore the impact of a data center configuration on both the users ’ and the service providers ’ requirements. We believe that this is the first step towards systematic data center design – an exciting area for future research. 1
