Venyu Blog

In the days before he became a leading comic actor in Hollywood, funnyman Steve Martin made his bones as a stand-up comedian complete with classic fake arrow through the head prop, ubiquitous banjo and that kitschy “King Tut” ditty. One of his routines, which actually provide a graceful lead-in to the topic at hand, went something like this: “In France oeuf means egg. Chapeau means hat. It’s like those French have a different word for everything.” Including, apparently, cloud computing.

According to this Network World Article, French hosting company ViFiB will pay you to place one of their servers in your home (providing you live in France, of course) in the belief it can save on expensive data center space by locating its servers in homes (and offices) with broadband Internet access. The end game? The ability to build an online hosting service (ostensibly a public cloud leveraging private, ahem, addresses) with five-nines (99.999 percent) availability.

Under this plan ViFiB’s “distributed” servers effectively eliminate the single point of failure that a data center might become during a major power outage. While citizens who volunteer for this privilege must meet some choice conditions, including having a fiber Internet connection with an IPv6 address and the ability to pay the electricity bill for the servers themselves, ViFiB will pay each homeowner a nominal fee each month to subsidize the cost of the FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) Internet connection to guarantee fast access.

In spite of the disparity in the number of possible households in France connected over DSL or fiber – 18.8 million in the former case versus 75,000 in the latter ―a fact of life that has resulted in ViFiB only placing a “handful” of its initial batch of 50 home-based servers by the end of June ― co-founder Jean-Paul Smets boldly declared: “I no longer have any faith in centralized hosting systems. With this, we can [go] further in terms of reliability than data centers let us today.”

While I’m not entirely sold on the value of “amping up” data center redundancy by bringing “the cloud” down to earth in unsecured, private residences no less, the ViFiB initiative does appear to reinforce the hypothesis that if you can use the cloud to more effectively deliver services, (in this case eliminating a single point of failure for your datacenter), it’s a noble goal, no matter what language you’re speaking.