French Homes Are the Newest Place to House Cloud Computing; Japan May Be Next

French Homes Are the Newest Place to House Cloud Computing; Japan May Be Next

If you live in France and you meet the technical requirements, ViFiB - a French hosting company - wants space in your home for a form of cloud computing.

According to a report from the IDG News Service, ViFiB thinks spreading servers across the country rather than in a data center - which has escalating energy and cooling costs - makes much more sense.

By placing its servers in houses and offices equipped with broadband Internet access, the company is creating a new hosting option somewhere between cloud computing and SETI@home, a distributed computing project, according to the news report.

ViFiB will rent out a machine with 1GB of RAM and 10GB of solid-state disk storage space, running on one core of an 8-core Intel (News - Alert) i7 860 processor, for around 8 Euros, or 9.70 U.S. dollars, per month, according to IDG.

The news report adds that ViFiB wants residents willing to plug two high-end PCs into their Internet connection and electricity supply. In return, ViFiB will pay up to 30 Euros per month to subsidize the cost of the fiber-to-the-home Internet connection necessary for fast access, the news report said.

There are a few conditions, according to the news report: Subscribers must have a fiber Internet connection with an IPv6 address, and must pay the electricity bill for the servers. ViFiB estimates that will come to around 10 Euros per server per month. For the French homes with electric heating, the waste heat from the servers would reduce the heating bill by a corresponding amount for around six months of the year. That makes ViFiB more environmentally friendly than most data centers, which pay for servers to heat the air, and then pay even more for air conditioners to cool it, ViFiB founder Jean-Paul Smets told IDG News Service.

The news story adds that by distributing its servers across France, ViFiB hopes to eliminate the risk of an entire data center going down during a major power outage. ViFiB's customers will have to come up with their own redundancy and security strategies on top of the servers it provides, although ViFiB will give some suggestions, according to IDG News Service.

IDG reports that only one French ISP, Free.fr, now offers a fiber connection meeting ViFiB's requirements. Its fiber-to-the-home service costs 29.90 Euros a month.

The first customer will be TioLive, a hosted ERP company also run by Smets. After France, Smets wants to place servers in homes in Japan, another country where TioLive has an office, according to IDG.

In a related matter, four open source software publishers, including TioLive, united in March 2010 to form the "Free Cloud Alliance," the first cloud computing open source initiative.