Nanodatacenters

Nanodatacenters proposes a radical solution to data hosting and delivery for the Internet of the future. The current data delivery architecture is “network centric”, with content stored in data centres connected directly to Internet backbones. This approach has multiple drawbacks among which complexity of deploying data centres, power consumption, and lack of scalability are the most critical.

The Nanodatacenters project takes a totally innovative and orthogonal approach to traditional data centres, through what we call “nano” data centres, which are deployed in boxes at the edge of the network (i.e. in home gateways, set-top-boxes, etc.) and accessed using a new peer-to-peer communication infrastructure. This disruptive evolution solves most of the inconveniences of current data centre based solutions, and allows for the deployment of next generation interactive applications. However, this creates a number of challenges as data has to be accessed and assembled dynamically “on-demand”, in real-time.

Nanodatacenters will design and develop the nanodata centre communication architecture with security and incentive mechanisms. We will demonstrate that Nanodatacenters is a cheap and scalable alternative to the current data hosting and delivery model. The full Nanodatacenters architecture will be implemented (i.e. an Nanodatacenters box will be fully specified and implemented). Virtualisation will be used to partition and manage box resources efficiently. Two interactive applications – multiplayer games and VoD – will be designed as a proof of concept.

Link: www.nanodatacenters.eu

Coordinator: Christophe Diot