Cloud computing environments are paving new ways to provide infrastructure for enterprise environments and datacenters. Modern multi-core computing platforms together with high performance networking technologies (InfiniBand and 10/40GigE iWARP with RDMA and atomic operations) and storage technologies (SSDs) are providing new opportunities to design these environments with performance and scalability. Past research along this direction has focused on designing different RDMA-aware middleware components (such as active caching, distributed shared substrate, load-balancing, reconfiguration and admission control). Current research directions focus on scalable and high-performance designs for Memacached, HBase, HDFS and MapReduce under the Hadoop infrastructure.