Unleashing The Power of Peer-to-Peer

You may think that college kids swapping digital music and geeks running programs to analyze radio signals from space are as far from the world of ordinary corporate computing as you can get. But those examples are just the beginning of a new series of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications that will be available to enterprise-computing developers in the coming months.

While Napster has had a good share of the P2P glory over its ability to share music files across the Internet, other P2P technologies are being used for more mundane applications. And for a service provider, a P2P relationship is preferable to traditional means of remote access because it places fewer demands on the provider.

"The data can be stored where the customer wants to store it. No data traffic moves through our service, and we don't have to manage that service," says Frank Hoppe, director of sales at uRoam, a Fremont, Calif.-based company that offers P2P solutions. "It's between you and your desktop."

Turning the Idle PC To Profit

Take the ability to test a Web site to withstand the load of thousands of visitors hitting the site concurrently. Before P2P, a testing organization would have had to purchase and set up machines in various data centers around the globe. Enter United Devices, which develops software that runs in place of a screen saver, taking over the PC when it's idle. The application coordinates the processing of otherwise idle computers across the Internet on particular applications. Volunteers willing to lend their PCs to these efforts download the applicable software from the Internet.

"United Devices' technology is really exciting. It gives access to virtually unlimited resources," says J.D. Brisk, managing director of Exodus Performance Labs, Lindon, Utah. "While it may seem like the 1,600 PCs we have in our lab are a lot, it isn't, especially if we have to stress-test large, mirrored Web sites. This technology opens the door to have tens of thousands of machines spread across the world available for testing, and still lets us maintain our advantage of being able to use realistic usage and load tests."

United Devices' software is just one of a group of technologies that share a PC's processing power when idle. The application grew out of an effort called SETI@home, which used idle PCs to analyze radio signals received from space-radio telescopes.

"My goal was to harness wasted CPU cycles that, to me, were just warming the air," says David Renardson, chief privacy officer at Vancouver, British Columbia-based PrivacyX, an Internet software developer that runs some 15 PCs using the SETI@home software. "I also liked that I would be participating in an interesting community and doing some good science."

Besides searching for signs of life on other planets, testing drug regimens for efficacy and conducting other basic science research, there are some other P2P applications. The benefit to the individual user is small,other than knowing your desktop is being put to good use and for a cause you agree with. The downside is that your desktop is being used for other purposes than what your company had originally intended.

So, why participate? If your PC is going to be running anyway, you might as well contribute its horsepower in some small way toward these cooperative computing efforts, P2P proponents say.

Dual Roles

United Devices is just one of many recent P2P ventures. All P2P technologies use some combination of hardware and software to share a particular desktop resource over the Internet, in a way that a desktop acts as both a client and a server for a particular application. Here's a look at what's available and what's soon to come:

%95 The simplest example of P2P technology is Windows peer file-and-print services. Anyone operating a Windows 95 or better desktop can share files and printers with anyone else on a network, or even over the Internet itself. That, of course, is both powerful and potentially dangerous, since an unsophisticated user can unintentionally make his or her files available to others who may not be authorized to share them. This P2P file-and-printer sharing is built into the Windows operating system; by merely checking a few boxes in the network control panel, you can turn it on.

%95 Napster is probably the most well-known example of P2P technology. It works by first installing a piece of software on the desktop. The software has two functions: One is the server function, which will scan your hard disk looking for digital music files and then publish this catalog to a machine under its control, using standard Internet protocols such as HTTP. Using the client function, the Napster software will allow you to search this catalog for the particular music you want to download, and then display other users who have stored the song on their hard drives. When you make your choice of music, you connect directly with the remote user and the file transfer is initiated, again using standard Internet protocols.

%95 Another class of technologies uses P2P as one element of its overall functionality. An example of this is MyCIO.com, a managed service provider established by Network Associates. One of MyCIO's features is scanning hard disks for viruses. It does this by using a file of existing virus patterns and trying to match the data on the disk with these patterns. Downloading these pattern files can be tedious and time-consuming, especially for corporations with hundreds of desktops. It also can easily consume huge amounts of Internet bandwidth. So MyCIO checks to see if another desktop on the local network has a more recent pattern file, and obtains the information from its peer before using the Internet to get the update.

%95 Yet another example of P2P technology is uRoam. This software tries to solve the two-computer problem, whereby you work on your home PC at night and then go to your office the next day but forget to make a copy of the files you worked on the night before. URoam is remote-control software, with one difference: You need only a browser on your local PC to control the remote "server" machine. Other remote-control products require similar software to be loaded at both ends.

In uRoam's case, both peers are really your own machines,you just happen to be using only one of them but connecting them together over the Internet to extract information from one and then use it elsewhere. Two passwords are needed, uRoam's Hoppe explains. The first connects the user's client,a laptop, mobile phone, PDA, etc.,to uRoam. "The service then goes out and makes the connection back to the desktop to serve up content," Hoppe says. The second password comes from the client on the desktop. Once that is received and the P2P relationship is made, "the uRoam service gets out of the way," he says.

"URoam is a fantastic new technology that is a little bit ahead of its time," says Marianne Wojnar, vice president of commercial marketing for RCN, a Princeton, N.J.-based high-speed Internet access provider that is testing the technology with plans to offer it to business customers. "Having a truly Web-based solution with access to your desktop is tremendous for anyone who travels."

A final P2P example comes from start-up Lightshare. The company will launch a service later this year that will enable anyone to sell anything from his desktop, without the need for a fixed Web site or specialized e-commerce server.

P2P Going Forward

We are just at the beginning of the P2P era, as more software vendors begin to incorporate its concepts into their products in the coming years. P2P offers solutions for many different kinds of applications, including the ability to share bandwidth, processing power and information.

"I signed up with SETI@home because I was interested in the application of the technology, not because I wanted to be the first guy to find E.T.," says Exodus Performance Labs' Brisk.

But, like E.T., with P2P technologies, you, too, could help your corporate clients be the first to discover new worlds of computing.

Chris Bucholtz, VARBusiness senior editor/technology, contributed to this story.

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What Made Napster a Hit?

Napster was a big deal because it combined several elements:

A simple concept,the ability to share digital music files.

Ease of use. Previous methods required mastery of file-transfer products and the ability to find an available server to download files from.

Use of standard Internet protocols and connections, so that users could leverage their existing Internet access accounts.

Use of the PC as both a client and a server,a fundamental aspect of P2P technologies.

The ability to create a community of users with common goals and interests.

The ability to build on P2P services to increase the overall value of the system. The more people that make use of the service, the more songs are available for sharing.

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Peer-To-Peer Preparation

P2P technology may not be in the corporate mainstream just yet, but smart solution providers should start preparing today for tomorrow's opportunity. Here's how:

First, download some non-Napster technologies, such as SETI@home or uRoam. Become familiar with how they're set up and the kinds of support issues your clients will ask about, such as security. You might also want to evaluate what uRoam offers with traditional remote-control programs, such as PC Anywhere, and decide if it's worth changing your client's existing corporate standard for that kind of application, particularly if you support many users who do not travel with their laptops.

Next, consider whether you have developed any custom programs that have downloads or file-transfer components in them. Examine the code to see if these applications are ripe for adding P2P features that will save on download times or Internet bandwidth. Use myCIO.com as a demonstration of how P2P can be a very minor part of the programming required but offers big customer benefits in terms of saving download times.

Finally, look into working with United Devices and others to see if you can take advantage of their shared-processor P2P technologies for your own purposes and applications.