The contemporary logistics focuses on the organization, planning, control and implementation of the flow of goods, money, information and people.
Some motivations for the emergence of interest in Data Logistics included: The growth in the volume of Web hits, combined with the steady increase in the size of Web-delivered objects such as images, audio and video clips resulted in the localized overloading of the bandwidth and processing resources of the local and/or wide area network and/or the Web server infrastructure.
The resulting Internet bottleneck can cause Web clients to experience poor performance or complete denial of access to servers that host high volume sites (the so-called Slashdot effect).
At the same time, research efforts in server replication and content delivery gave rise to a number of related projects and strategies, including Logistical Networking (LN).
The name LN was intended as an analogy to physical supply chain logistics, in which goods are not only carried from source to destination on networks of roads, but are also stored at warehouses located throughout the transportation infrastructure.
The principles that underpin LN have been abstracted into the more general study of scheduling and optimization across the traditional infrastructure silos of Storage, Networking and Processing which was named Data Logistics.