Firms urged not to ditch P2P

The US Supreme Court's decision to find against P2P firm Grokster should not deter corporates from evaluating and deploying potentially useful P2P networks, industry experts advised today.

According to Gartner, interest in file distribution systems such as BitTorrent illustrate that this type of technology will play a fundamental role in the delivery of video on demand and large data files within enterprise environments.

The analyst firm explained that BitTorrent works by breaking large files, such as videos and software distributions, into small pieces usually of about 256Kb which are 'seeded' from an initial source.

The BitTorrent application on each user's PC searches for and downloads pieces, typically from any of 30 to 50 peers that already have these pieces, and then makes them available to other users. This means that files can be distributed quickly and efficiently without a central server.

"This concept of spreading files over a network will be seminal in the development of video on demand and the delivery of multimedia files. As demand and file sizes increase, conventional architectures will struggle to cope," an analysis by Gartner analysts Stephen Prentice and Mike McGuire stated.

"BitTorrent technology could support highly resilient distribution of software (as for Red Hat's Fedora project), updates, media files, data sets and other applications where file sizes normally require the use of physical media."

Gartner predicts that BitTorrent could be one of the most disruptive technologies in the next few years. It noted that many companies, including Peer Impact and Mashboxx, are developing peer-to-peer architectures.

"This approach is getting attention because the film and music industries are arguing that BitTorrent's sole purpose is the illegal distribution of copyright material," said the Gartner analysis.

"But companies such as Atzio Technology are already using a torrent approach to delivering licensed content from the networks or cable companies."

Enterprises should not dismiss BitTorrent and P2P applications as a transient consumer technology, according to Gartner. Instead they should consider whether to use the technology to distribute information inside their companies or to customers and partners.

"Consider file-sharing technology as a way to alleviate pressure on your network and to make it more resilient," Gartner advised.