Projects

NanoDataCenters

project name: Nano Data Centers

Framework Programme: FP7 programme area: ICT – Information and Communication Technologies contract type: CP – Collaborative Project

contract/proposal/call number: 223850

status: active

start date: May 2008 duration: 36 months projected finish date: May 2011

Keywords

keywords: data; hosting; delivery; internet

Project Budget

total budget: € 4,903,850

Participants

Note that the follow people may not represent the full extent of the consortium. FEAST has tried to identify the Australian participants, and their collaborators (or coordinator), within the project. Also note that Australian participation may not necessarily be on a formal level. Further details about the partners in this project can be found at the website listed below.

name	organisation	state or country
Yves-Marie La Pannerer	Thomson	France
	NICTA	Australia

Further information

WWW: nanodatacenters.eu

summary:
The project 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 ECHOS 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. ECHOS will design and develop the nano-data centre communication architecture with security and incentive mechanisms. We will demonstrate that ECHOS is a cheap and scalable alternative to the current data hosting and delivery model. The full ECHOS architecture will be implemented (i.e. an ECHOS box will be fully specified and implemented). Virtualization 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. A large scale testbed will be deployed to evaluate the benefits and performance of ECHOS. We will contribute the ECHOS architecture to the relevant standardization bodies and to discussion groups on the design of the Internet of the Future. The project is in line with the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) of the NEM initiative. The project is expected to lead to the commercialization of the ECHOS box. This will result in a competitive advantage for European industry and SMEs.

The NaDa objective is to tap into these underutilised resources at the edge and use them as a substitute/aid to expensive monolithic data centres.
Source: DG-RTD spreadsheet.

Historically, content distribution in the Internet has relied on a client-server model. This model has shaped all Internet legacy applications such as the web, electronic mail messaging, and FTP. For the past ten years, we have seen content distribution solutions that have evolved from classical client-server models, through distributed caching, to Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), and more recently peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. NaDa (Nanodatacenters) is the next step in data hosting and in the content distribution paradigm. By enabling a distributed hosting edge infrastructure, NaDa can enable the next generation of interactive services and applications to flourish, complementing existing data centres and reaching a massive number of users in a much more efficient manner.

Increased computational power, combined with advances in data storage and global networking, has made Internet services a critical resource in our everyday life. Data centres (buildings that host large numbers of networked computer servers and power supplies) are often critical enablers of such services. Data centres are known to be a major source of cost and complexity for operators, while they are inherently not scalable due to their centralised nature. As a result, router companies, server manufactures, and hosting facilities hasten to produce more efficient hardware and software for data centres. They also try to improve the efficiency of operation of such components. For instance, operators may dynamically shut down some processes in machines or even entire machines, depending upon the current load. They may also redirect surplus load to other idle machines in the same data centre. While this effort improves efficiency, it is bound to produce rather short-term remedies. Indeed, the entire paradigm of monolithic data centres seems to be challenged, not the specifics of their numerous possible realizations.

The NaDa approach is classic in one respect, and revolutionary in others. It moves content and complexity to the edge, which is perfectly in line with the Internet’s original philosophy and offers the maximum guarantee of network performance and availability (no additional complexity in the network). However, it is a revolutionary approach in next generation Internet research, especially when compared to the approach currently taken in the US which is to re-design the architecture of the network core in order to better handle content instead of using existing resources at the edge. Still, NaDa does not ignore the current CDN or cache-based content delivery architecture. In fact, NaDa will use existing caches or CDNs to improve the quality of service experienced by users.

In order to combine all unused edge resources, NaDa will use a new, managed peer-to-peer (P2P) communication architecture. The P2P paradigm allows the deployment of new services such as file sharing or telephony quite easily without having to scale servers for peak capacity. However, most of the currently deployed P2P systems have focused on simple file sharing or streaming applications (and often for illegal content). Thus, several fundamental issues must be addressed in order to invent a new P2P paradigm for the NaDa system.
Source: Nanodatacenters website.

Participants
NATIONAL ICT AUSTRALIA LIMITED AUSTRALIA
FIRST OVERSI LTD ISRAEL
INSTITUT EURECOM FRANCE
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS GREECE
UNIVERSITE PIERRE ET MARIE CURIE - PARIS 6 FRANCE
MARTEL GMBH SWITZERLAND
TELEFONICA INVESTIGACION Y DESARROLLO SA SPAIN
FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FOERDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG E.V. GERMANY

Source:Cordis

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