The explosion in globally connected devices, computers, and services ultimately evolves into very large-scale, inter-connected systems approaching a new era of planetary-scale computing. The backbone of planetary-scale computing is a global network of data centers. The paper provides an overview of research at HP Laboratories exploring new approaches under such a scenario based on HP's virtual data center platform enabling large-scale distributed virtual data center environments. Our approach is founded in a service-centric system view, and we explore agent technology for resource control, system organization, and balancing resource demand and supply.