Consumer-Oriented Computing: A Path to Community Data Centers

TL;DR

This paper advocates for community data centers located near consumers to reduce latency, ease engineering challenges, and improve disaster resilience, proposing a technical design and business strategy for their implementation.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of community data centers, detailing a technical design and business approach to enhance data center ecosystem efficiency.

Findings

Reduces latency and network load for ISPs

Improves disaster resilience of data centers

Simplifies engineering complexity

Abstract

Modern large-scale data centers are known for their engineering complexity, cooling, and oversubscription challenges. To mitigate these issues, this article proposes the implementation of community data centers that are closer to consumers as part of the data center ecosystem. Having a community data center can reduce latency, minimize network burden on Internet Service Providers (ISPs), utilize full computing capability, available during disaster events, and simplify the engineering complexity associated with traditional data centers. In addition to that, this article explores one technical design for such a community data center and the business strategy for operating community data centers.