Cloud and data center performance [Guest Editorial]

Modern data centers, consisting of massive farms of servers and abundant bandwidth availability, are becoming the next computing platform for the Internet. Cloud computing, as an efficient means of providing computing resources in the form of utility, uses data centers to play its pivotal role of leasing computing and storage resources to users. Cloud computing has already become prevalent with the burgeoning of cloud service providers, such as Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine. The paradigm shift to cloud computing is driven by a strong demand, especially from enterprises, to improve the overall efficiency of using and managing computing resources.