Data center into the average family

"The average home will turn into a data center," Jean-Paul Smets of ViFib in France so declared. ViFib (Hosting Company) brings together a number of server boxes erected at home, etc. to provide cloud computing services for "virtualized data centers."

So, this day will really come?

Gather home server boxes to build virtual data centers

Photo 1 "SlapOS BOX"

Photo 2 ● Jean-Paul Smets of ViFib

Photo 3 SlapOS BOX in a family pot

The operating structure of ViFib is as follows: The company has "SlapOS BOX" set up in households such as FTTH access to install the equipment for the family to pay construction and line usage fees. Because SlapOS BOX is powered by the open source distributed cloud-computing platform SlapOS, "multiple SlapOS BOXs in different locations can serve as a data center for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms (Jean-Paul Smets)

However, ViFib is not providing ordinary cloud computing services at present, but rather providing backup services for such extraordinary periods as disasters. The company calls it a DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) disaster recovery service.

Of course, families have neither back-up lines nor power supplies used in times of trouble, so their individual availability can not be compared to a data center. However, Smets believes SlapOS can use multiple machines to replicate data. By distributing servers in different countries or communication carriers, and reducing the chance of a crash, it can be leveraged as a backup at disaster.

According to Nexedi, a French company that supports the development of SlapOS by ViFib's parent company, SlapOS is used by the Ivory Coast's Ministry of Internal Affairs for the backbone of 30,000 mission-critical applications. Of course, the Ivory Coast system operates in a government data center. Although it is not an ordinary home, it leverages SlapOS's functional data to achieve redundancy and decentralized storage of data. Ivory Coast's Ministry of Interior official said that we chose SlapOS reason, first of all, it is to develop the source code, so the source code can be supervised, and secondly, distributed cloud computing availability in the event of a failure.

Currently, Nexedi has released the developed ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or "ERP5," as open source software (OSS), using institutions such as the European Central Bank. Smets believes that as OSS frees users from vendor lock-in, we look forward to liberating users from the cloud computing vendor's dominance through SlapOS.

During the interview, Smets presented a photo (Photo 3) showing the place where they were placed in Slapos BOX - a potted backyard. Smets explained that, even so, SlapOS BOX still works. Due to the redundancy of data, there is no problem even if the reliability of each server is low.

A toy becomes the basic system of IT history

Currently, ViFib's commercial services need further development. Although the family's optical fiber integration will increase its overall capacity, but after all, the distribution of communication between server BOX, the speed was significantly lower than the data center. At the same time, the cost of setting up homes in every family was significantly higher than in the data center.

However, Smets's photo of the boxed server box left a deep impression on reporters, allowing reporters to start worrying about the future of this tiny server box. It is like a toy or a broken groceries, but because of this, it is more and more people care about.

Looking at the history of IT, the first thing that looks like a toy, and the last to enhance performance as a mission-critical business, is everywhere. For example, the computer was once a toy, but now it is the enterprise's foundational system. As another example, the router was originally a device that was less reliable than the switches supporting the telephone network. SlapOS BOX in potted plants can not help but remind journalists of guinea pigs in the garages and routers that are assembled or manufactured in a university lab.

In fact, there have been botnets such as ViFib that have brought together many of the computers that include an average home for commercial activities. Hackers spread the virus and the Trojan horse (Trojan horse) to remotely operate the computer and use it for "business," such as sending spam. If we can carry out business activities in a legal way, we may be able to transform the IT industry fundamentally.

Reviewing IT history again, with the changing times, the gap between the IT resources held by enterprises and the IT resources held by individuals is gradually shortened. One aspect of IT development - in the past only the resources owned by businesses and governments are now available to individuals. Imagine the day when "my home will become part of a data center" will really come.