Greening the internet with nano data centers

Motivated by increased concern over energy consumption in modern data centers, we propose a new, distributed computing platform called Nano Data Centers (NaDa). NaDa uses ISP-controlled home gateways to provide computing and storage services and adopts a managed peer-to-peer model to form a distributed data center infrastructure. To evaluate the potential for energy savings in NaDa platform we pick Video-on-Demand (VoD) services. We develop an energy consumption model for VoD in traditional and in NaDa data centers and evaluate this model using a large set of empirical VoD access data. We find that even under the most pessimistic scenarios, NaDa saves at least 20% to 30% of the energy compared to traditional data centers. These savings stem from energy-preserving properties inherent to NaDa such as the reuse of already committed baseline power on underutilized gateways, the avoidance of cooling costs, and the reduction of network energy consumption as a result of demand and service co-localization in NaDa.