Plug2Cloud: an energy-efficient datacenter

Nowadays, large data center infrastructures are the prerogative of few industrials because of their total cost of ownership. Besides the entrance fees required for the hardware, an equally important limiting factor for anyone who's willing to develop, analyze and experiment distributed applications that require such data centers are the costs related to power and cooling such infrastructures. A further barrier is given by logistic problems: often, server rooms conceived for research centers and universities are not designed to host, power and cool all the required hardware. In this paper we introduce Plug2Cloud, a cheap, energy and space-efficient cluster of Plug Computers to democratize
research and experiments in cloud computing and data centers. In this work, we show, through some use cases, the versatility and effectiveness of our architecture for studying data-intensive storage and computing applications.