* P2P has applications for enterprise firms
Peer-to-peer technologies have become associated with piracy in most people’s minds – but P2P is a computing model that has many above-board applications. The basic premise of P2P is that computing, storage and networking capacities are all held at “peers” in a decentralized network. The architecture of a P2P system is similar to a grid-computing infrastructure, and has just as many applications in the data center.
As peer-to-peer technologies mature, many companies have been trying to apply the principles of P2P in developing products for the enterprise market. Such products leverage the design principles of P2P to create ad-hoc, virtual networks with very high resilience and efficiency.
Unlike the client-server model, which is asymmetric, peers in a P2P network are equivalent and interchangeable. Nodes in the network operate independently, forming ad-hoc connections to their peers in a dynamic fashion. This makes the network resilient to individual node outages and scalable across thousands of nodes with ease.
Some of the potential applications for P2P networks in the enterprise include:
* Distributed backup: Nodes in this kind of network can share storage space, sending data to be backed up on multiple nodes. Each chunk of data to be backed up is split into multiple redundant chunks that are encrypted and distributed, thus ensuring that the data can be reconstructed even if some chunks disappear.
* Document sharing: With the addition of enterprise features such as encryption, authentication and access permissions, enterprises can use P2P networks to create shared document repositories without a central server.
* Collaboration applications: Combining IM, document sharing and whiteboarding, P2P applications can enable collaboration across an ad-hoc network without the need for a central server.
* Content distribution: Used to distribute content in an efficient manner, P2P networks can reduce the requirements for bandwidth and storage. The P2P network will leverage each peer as a distribution center for other peers.
P2P networks are already adopting technologies that we traditionally find in the data center, such as XML/SOAP, SIP, encryption, PKI and VoIP. Some examples of sophisticated P2P software for the enterprise market include:
* FolderShare, an encrypted document sharing system.
* Groove, a P2P collaboration suite.
* HiveCache, a distributed P2P back-up system.
Just like instant messaging, P2P is a technology that emerged in the consumer space, but which is rapidly evolving into an enterprise-class tool. Employees familiar with P2P from their home computers may, in fact, wonder why enterprise technologies for document sharing, backup and content distribution are so “inflexible” by comparison. If the term “P2P” bothers you because of its nefarious connotations, you can just as easily refer to it as a “grid.”
