DBJ*Home Cloud™

Neighbourhood Cloud

Update 2010 03 18

I somehow forgot to draw a parallel with “Private Clouds”: Cloud computing installations owned by companies. Vis-a-vis the public Clouds where many “tenants” (aka companies) live in the same cloud. That makes the public Cloud cheap and flexible but also an instant receiver of a big firm: “No!”, from banks and other organizations paranoid about security.

DBJ “Home Cloud” (Household Cloud ?) idea is actually a private cloud, but scaled-down and installed (and owned) by a single household. Or maybe by a neighborhood, where I perhaps can invent a nice term “Neighbourhood Cloud” :) An interesting proposal. Should be cheaper than “Household Cloud”. But equally effective. With wireless connections to the households (WiMax probably), etc.

In any case, if anyone is interested in the scale of “Private Clouds” imminent market “avalanche”, please watch carefully this video: http://news.zdnet.com/2422-19178_22-404938.html

Why not have a “little cloud at home”?

Cloud computing center in each house. Data Center in a neat home packaging?
Home Cloud
Neighborhood Cloud One or two small racks. But still real racks. Well ventilated, kept secure, and in the dark. Probably in the basement of the house.
Built as a micro Cloud. But following all the principles of the real “big” Cloud.

Hardware? One or two physical servers, running Hyper-Visor with virtual machines. Probably (now defunct) Windows Home Server Variety. Although I am not sure if WHS clustering goes as smoothly as Windows 2008 Server. All of this is the real stuff.

Add one infrastructure appliance: firewall, load balancer, broadband switch, and security. New “network home appliance kind”. This thing does not exist yet, but I would recommend that Juniper and Cisco, start delivering them soon. They are already converging devices into fewer boxes. The same concept but scaled down for the “Home Cloud”. Probably the whole home data center infrastructure in one box. Just imagine the amount of “geekiness” oozing from that device.

Going further, and “facing backward”. One disk array “in the back” storing the databases, media files, etc … Perhaps even iSCSI, with fiber optics and a dedicated level 3 switch. If the price is right?

One backup device. Probably optical RW storage.

Cooling: water of course. Although natural air cooling is very modern these days. Here is the opportunity for architects to make a difference in a completely new way.

Energy: Fuel cell of course. This could be the first successful fuel cell application in homes.

There are other computer-aided house elements that will go in here: smart metering, house security, VOIP device, sound system, etc…

Hm… Does this seem to be a very good idea? I am sure someone has thought of this before.

 

London, UK — Dec 2009 — DBJ

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