The NECSTCloud is a project born within the NECST Laboratory (Novel, Emerging Computing System Technologies Laboratory) at Politecnico di Milano.
The project aims at creating a low-cost, scalable cloud infrastructure for handling the increasing demand of computing power for research purposes.
The project started in late 2012 and a first working deployment came to live in 2013 thanks to the great efforts of master students, young researchers, and professors of the NECSTLab.
The NECSTCloud infrastructure is based on the Linux QEMU/KVM hypervisor, managed through OpenNebula 4.0.
The cloud controller, which is the most critical component of the infrastructure, is fully redundant: the network stack, filesystem, services and cloud controller are all configured in tranparent failover mode, so that if any hardware or software component fails, the cloud will continue working.
The NECSTCloud is green! Indeed, it allows to recycle old, spare machines (which would be otherwise disposed) to increase the backup storage pool. This is possible thanks to GlusterFS, a distributed file system capable of scaling to several petabytes (actually, 72 brontobytes!) and handling thousands of clients.
