Disaggregated Architectures and the Redesign of Data Center Ecosystems: Scheduling, Pooling, and Infrastructure Trade-Offs

Hardware disaggregation seeks to transform Data Center (DC) resources from traditional server fleets into unified resource pools. Despite existing challenges that may hinder its full realization, significant progress has been made in both industry and academia. In this article, we provide an overview of the motivations and recent advancements in hardware disaggregation. We further discuss the research challenges and opportunities associated with disaggregated architectures, focusing on aspects that have received limited attention. We argue that hardware disaggregation has the potential to reshape the entire DC ecosystem, impacting application design, resource scheduling, hardware configuration, cooling, and power system optimization. Additionally, we present a numerical study to illustrate several key aspects of these challenges.