The world has entered in the Era of Data. The role of data centers is more and more relevant due to the increased amount of data produced that have to be computed and stored. Therefore the scientific and engineering interest focuses on the research of new technologies to increase the computational power and storage capacity of data centers, and at the same time on the necessity to reduce their energy footprint. Some of the available technological solutions, that can be used to meet the requirements for performance and energy efficiency, are presented in the first part of this thesis. They are the well-established NVMe protocol, designed to become an industrial standard that exploits the performance given by the PCIe it leverages, and the computational storage.