BitTorrent For The Enterprise is Worth Considering
Previous posts explained why I believe BitTorrent is a problem, but like most technology, BitTorrent does have a worth while purpose. BitTorrent for enterprise network usage isn’t anything new, but according to TorrentFreak, a Dutch University finally decided to use the peer to peer protocol for software patch distribution. Naturally, the decision makers at the university were reluctant to implement the technology as a result of the negative press surrounding the protocol, but after seeing BitTorrent in action, they quickly changed their mind. Not to mention, it’s free!
Fewer Servers and Faster Distribution
Frank Gombalt, a member of the University’s IT staff, stated,
“The university now uses 20 servers less than before, those servers were placed decentralized to send data to the desktops and to spare the WAN-connections.”
Here are the numbers comparing the before and after:
Before:
20 servers
25.6 terabytes
4 day completion time
After:
2 centralized SMS2003 servers
25.6 terabytes
Under 4 hour completion time
Who in their right mind would argue with those drastic improvements? Less hardware and power consumption mean more money - and saving money something any company is interested in pursuing. For rapid internal file distribution across an enterprise, BitTorrent is a method worth implementing. Does your company or organization use BitTorrent for internal file distribution? If so, please share how the technology presented, approved, and implemented.
Technology Made Simple
Here is the...
Now this is something worth respecting. I presonally stay away from Torrents and stick with Usenet. It’s faster, more reliable, and more trusted. From a Network Administrator point of view however this looks awsome. It takes us a little less than a week to patch around 6K machines across 89 locations. If you could set it up securely and not talking to the WAN this would definitely be something worth trying out.