Standardization Efforts for Traditional Data Center Infrastructure Management: The Big Picture

Traditional data center infrastructure suffers from a lack of standard and ubiquitous management solutions. Despite the achieved advances, existing tools lack interoperability and are sometimes hardware dependent. Vendors are already actively participating in the specification and design of new standard software and hardware interfaces within different forums. Nevertheless, the complexity and variety of data center infrastructure components that includes servers, cooling, networking, and power hardware, coupled with the introduction of the software defined data center paradigm, led to the parallel development of a myriad of standardization efforts. In an attempt to shed light on recent works, we survey and discuss the main standardization efforts for traditional data center infrastructure management.