Despite Adam's prognostications, this tech trend's
(in my best Monty Python voice) "not quite dead yet."
Greg
http://www.commvergemag.com/commverge/issues/2001/200102/02cs.asp
Cover Story February 2001
Strength in numbers
The powerful potential of peer-to-peer.
Brian Dipert, Contributing Editor
If you haven't yet heard of Napster, then with all
due respect, you've apparently spent the past
year cooped up in a cabin in the backwoods of
Montana. Napster's simple, straightforward
system for swapping MP3 files has music
listeners jumping for joy, music producers
hopping mad, and musicians firmly ensconced on
both sides of the love/hate fence (with some
tenuously straddling it).
But this isn't another article about Napster. This
is an article about a much larger trend, of which
Napster is but a small example. It's about a
potentially enormous change in the fabric of our
digital universe. About fundamental shifts in the
way we compute and communicate. And it starts
with an unassuming acronym, P2P, which stands for "peer-to-peer."
Napster has brought the term P2P into the public consciousness, but has also
tainted it with an overly limited and negative connotation. Peer-to-peer is about
file swapping, yes, but more generally it's about sharing. Not just files, but also
computing power, storage resources, ideas, and other things we probably
haven't even thought of yet. When Pat Gelsinger, vice president and chief
technical officer of Intel, commented at last fall's Intel Developers Conference
that, "peer-to-peer computing could usher in the next generation of the Internet,
as Mosaic sparked the last," I don't think he was just getting excited about
being able to snag free Metallica tracks.
Groundwork
Peer-to-peer interchange doesn't necessarily have to be between two PCs,
either. Anything Net-connected, from a thermostat to a supercomputer, is
potentially a participant in the P2P party. Let's begin our exploration of
peer-to-peer and its counterpart, client-server, with a few definitions, so that
we're sure we're speaking the same language.
Client-server, in its most extreme form,
describes a networking arrangement in which
one member, the client, is a "dumb" device,
with only enough processing and memory
capability to boot itself, load a minimal
operating system, make requests to other computers, and communicate the
results of those requests to the user. The server on the other end of the
communication link does all the heavy lifting. It passively waits for incoming
requests, receives them, translates them, does whatever processing is required
based on them, and sends the results back in a format the client can accept. The
server communicates with numerous clients and must both queue and prioritize
their inbound requests. If it assumes that all clients are equally "stupid" and that
all communications links between server and clients are bandwidth-deficient, it
by necessity communicates with the clients in a consistent low-resolution,
text-only manner.
The client-server model is the domain of, for example, the
vintage VT100 terminal (and now the numerous VT100
software emulators running on otherwise-intelligent
computers), and, in slightly more advanced forms, the X
terminal and Microsoft's Windows Terminal Services. It's a
model that companies such as Netscape (now part of
AOL), Oracle, and Sun Microsystems enthusiastically
embrace, because it puts the bulk of the hardware and
software innovation (translation: initial sales and upgrades)
on the server. Intel and Microsoft both sell into the server
space, too, but the majority of their money is made on the client side, so their
lukewarm embrace of client-server (and Microsoft's well-documented pursuit of
Netscape) is understandable.
Microsoft's much-publicized .NET initiative might at first glance appear to be a
capitulation to client-server trends. But close inspection of the company's
distributed-computing plans reveals a blend of client-server, peer-to-peer, and
standalone computing techniques, as well as no relief on client processing and
memory requirements. Cynically, one could make a credible argument that—in
spite of Microsoft's claims of .NET's potential for "increased collaboration" and
"lower maintenance costs"—the overwhelming intent of the initiative is simply
to boost the company's revenues via pay-per-use tolls, and the elimination of
illegal software duplication and single-license but multi-system installations.
Peer-to-peer, in its purest form, is at the complete opposite end of the usage
spectrum from client-server. In P2P, both interacting users have robust
processing and storage resources at their disposal, and the link between them is
fat, fast to respond, and persistent. The increasing reality of this presumption is
behind the groundswell of interest in P2P. Even entry-level PCs sport 500-MHz
CPUs and high-speed, 2-Gbyte hard disks. University students, perhaps the
most enthusiastic Napster groupies (along with subversive office cubicle
dwellers) share T1 connections. Home adoption of cable and DSL connections
is exploding. And Metricom's Ricochet service and DirecPC give a glimpse into
how the high-bandwidth wireless future might take shape.
Same as the old stuff
P2P may be the latest trendy buzzword, but examples of the general concept
have existed for years. Consider, for example, the simple networking that's been
in Windows since the version 3.11 days. Windows For Workgroups enabled
users to access each other's hard drives and peripherals such as printers, first
under the proprietary NetBEUI protocol and later under industry-standard
alternatives such as TCP/IP. Now, in fact, even the ability for an entire LAN to
share one client's Internet connection is built into the operating system. In the
old days, peer-to-peer networks were discouraged for anything more than the
smallest workgroup configurations, because of the performance burdens they
placed both on clients and on the LAN. But in the modern era of switched
100-Mbit/sec Ethernet connections and 1.5-GHz Pentium 4 processors, these
apprehensions are becoming increasingly dated.
How about sharing processing power? SETI@home (setiathome.berkeley.edu)
has been in existence for almost two years now, and I've had it on my
computers for several months (check out my stats on the SETI site via user
name bdipert@pacbell.net). Even though SETI@home is set to always run in
the background, I rarely notice even a hint of a drag on even my
lowest-performance PC (though I always turn it off whenever I'm doing
hardware or software benchmarking). Similar concepts find use in programs
like FightAIDS@home (www.fightaidsathome.com), based on the
general-purpose Entropia resource-coalescing algorithm, and by Sun's
Java-enabled Grid Engine.
Lotus Notes, a groupware collaborative communications pioneer, harnessed a
mostly client-server approach (along with a local client storage cache) for
interactions between a PC and the server hosting various Notes databases. Each
night when those databases scattered across the globe replicated with each
other, though, they communicated as peers. Ironically, Ray Ozzie, the creator of
Notes, is now the founder, chairman and CEO of peer-to-peer platform
developer Groove Networks. Ozzie has mused that if he had to do Notes all
over again, "I wouldn't make it server-based." And with Groove, he's executing
on his vision.
Peer-to-peer server interaction even precedes Notes. Consider, for example, the
auto-updating done by DNS and Usenet servers, both of which in contrast
interact with individual computer users in a client-server fashion. The
collaborative gaming built into popular PC titles such as Unreal Tournament
and Quake III: Team Arena operates in a mostly peer-to-peer fashion, and
CenterSpan started out targeting online gaming with a completely peer-to-peer
approach. Although most of today's chat software (AOL's ICQ and Instant
Messenger, Microsoft's MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and so on) is
server-enabled, it doesn't have to be. Jabber, for example, is an open-source
peer-to-peer messaging client.
The concept of file sharing across the Internet will be old news to anyone who's
ever done an FTP upload or download. Server-initiated file transfer had its
origins in the frequently-cursed "push" technology of a few years ago, which
like the old man in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, isn't dead
yet. Though Napster is the P2P poster child, Napster's MP3-swapping equation
actually depends on a network of servers. You log into a server, and from that
point on you view the hard drive contents only of others who are also logged
into that same server. Those pesky servers are why Metallica was able to force
Napster to track down and expel users who were offering to trade copies of the
band's songs. And the lack of server middlemen is why content developers and
marketers fear purer P2P alternatives like Aimster (which, as the name implies,
runs 'on top' of AOL Instant Messenger), CuteMX, Freenet, Gnutella, Hotline,
iMesh, Ohaha, and Publius.
Napster is today's leading music-sharing application primarily by virtue of its
being first. Yet, in addition to the presence of servers, it's got other non-ideal
P2P characteristics, too. It relies on a proprietary set of communication rules
known as the Napster protocol. And it only enables swapping of MP3 files.
Programs such as Pakster and Wrapster enable you to disguise other files as
MP3s, but they're clumsy to use.
Secrets of success
Notice the P2P/client-server hybrid trend yet? In reality, very few of today's
networked applications are purely client-server or peer-to-peer, but the clear
migration is toward the latter. David Gelertner, professor of computer science
at Yale University, notes in his essay "The Second Coming: A Manifesto," "If a
million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn't that mean we must have a
heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No. We could move the site
onto a million desktops and use the Internet for coordination. Could
Amazon.com be an itinerant horde instead of a fixed central command post?
Yes."
In his Developers Forum keynote, Intel's
Gelsinger drew some intriguing parallels
between the history of Mosaic and the potential
of P2P. The trigger point in the Internet
revolution came not just when a compelling
application (Mosaic) emerged but also when important infrastructure
requirements were satisfied—common protocols, ease of use, standards,
scalability and security. Plenty of Internet-based applications existed before
Mosaic, including FTP, NNTP, WAIS, Gopher, and even WWW. But the pre-
and post-Mosaic statistics speak for themselves. In 1992, 50 Web servers existed
worldwide. The University of Illinois released the first version of Mosaic in
1993. One year later there were 10,000 Web servers.
P2P holds promise for shifting the bulk of computing towards the edges of the
network, if it can satisfy these same infrastructure requirements. And therein
lies both Intel's excitement about P2P and its participation. When it comes to
driving industry standardization of computing hardware and software, Intel has
served in a way that's either (depending on your perspective) welcome and
impartial or heavy-handed and self-serving.
Now the company, most visibly through evangelist Bob Knighten (and his staff)
and the Intel-sponsored Peer-to-Peer Working Group, hopes to similarly guide
P2P to a successful future, which benefits both consumers and numerous
companies (and by the way also sells lots of fast microprocessors and
networking equipment). Intel's investment group has even gotten into the act,
bankrolling several P2P startup companies and peering into the plans and
potentials of dozens of others. Intel's still-attached-at-the-hip partner, Microsoft,
has even shown signs of understanding the need for non-proprietary
approaches in a pervasively networked world; the foundation of the .NET
initiative will be constructed of industry-standard XML (extensible markup
language). Industry-standard protocols that build on an already-mature Internet
foundation, such as FTP and HTTP, WebDAV, URL, and MIME, are oft-touted
in the documentation for Endeavors Technology's Magi P2P infrastructure
software.
Big bang?
Is it possible to quantify the potential impact of P2P? Three "rules of the
network" give a glimpse into the approach's possibilities.
Sarnoff's Law (named after broadcast pioneer David Sarnoff) regards the
network as a medium with few transmitters and many receivers. The value of
services targeted from the former to the latter linearly increases with the
number of transmitters. We'll call this variable "n."
Metcalfe's Law, coined by the so-called Father of the Internet, Ethernet
inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, regards the network as a medium
for inter-communication, in which each device can converse with as many as
(n-1) other devices, where n represents the total number of network nodes.
Therefore the value of the network is n(n-1) or approximately n2. For an
analogy, think of how useless a single fax machine is. But as more fax machines
appear, the value of the resulting network that links them increases by the
square of their total number.
Finally, we turn to Reed's Law, coined by computer and network consultant
David Reed. Reed views the network as a grouping medium in which as many
as 2n-n-1, or approximately 2n, different interest groups may form. Why are
these equations important? The Internet contains millions of Web servers. But it
encompasses hundreds of millions of client PCs. Now consider the billions of
PDAs, Web-enabled cell phones, refrigerators, and other devices which'll go
online in the years ahead. Whether calculated by equations containing n, n2 or
2n, that's a whole lotta incremental value.
As increasingly "dumb" but still Net-connected widgets enter the picture,
though, the lines between client-server and peer-to-peer will increasingly blur. A
workstation won't be able to talk with a supercomputer in the same way that it
converses with a security sensor, after all. Just as fax machines and modems
negotiate to reach a mutually agreeable communication level, back-and-forth
interrogation of capabilities will be required of any pervasive P2P application.
The fact that my workstation wouldn't necessarily want to share the same type
of information with a security sensor as it shares with a supercomputer will
naturally simplify this effort.
Alternatively, too, my thermostat or Net-enabled refrigerator might use the
home server in my closet as its proxy or surrogate, enabling the more robust
device to act in its stead for interactions it wouldn't be able to handle itself. P2P
software must also comprehend the fact that some devices will be behind
firewalls and therefore be unable or unwilling to respond to communications
initiated from outside. In such a case, a surrogate outside the firewall might
queue up these requests for devices behind the firewall to periodically examine
and reply to.
If the already-mentioned P2P examples aren't enough to whet your appetite,
here's a few more ideas for your consideration. First, how many (or should I
say, how few) of you regularly back up your hard drives to a tape or other
medium? Well, if a statistically determined percentage of all computers on a
LAN contained not only their own files but also copies of other computers'
files, you wouldn't need to back up at all. Your computer, should it encounter a
damaged or missing file, could search for and download a copy located
elsewhere on the network. Such an approach, currently under development in
Microsoft's research labs, would have to comprehend the fact that not all
computers on the network would be present at all times (some would be off,
notebooks would be disconnected for travel). But it's just statistics, not rocket
science. And backup wouldn't even need to take the form of a session that you
have to remember to initiate or task-schedule.
Here's another one. You're the IT director of a
multinational company with a far-flung array of
offices scattered across the globe. Most
locations are plagued by slow, expensive and
unreliable WAN access. Employees periodically
request large multimedia files for training
purposes. Do you a) force each employee to
download a copy of each file, b) install an
expensive server and associated IT personnel at each location, c) ship lots of
environmentally unfriendly CD-Rs and Zip discs around, or d) rely on P2P
software that could automatically detect that another computer on the office
LAN already has the desired file and automatically provide it to the requesting
client? I thought you'd pick d.
Situation No. 3. I'm just as impressed with the Google search engine as
everyone else. But I still get a higher percentage of bogus results than I'd prefer.
And certain times of the day, when traffic is high, the responses just crawl back
to my DSL-equipped PC, indicating that the server on the other end is the
bottleneck. Isn't there a better way? Thought you'd never ask. Why send a
search request halfway across the country when your buddy in the cubicle next
to you did a similar search 5 minutes ago? And, if he's already sorted through
and found the few links that really matter, and he's part of your workgroup and
therefore probably has the same criteria you do, why recreate his efforts? It's
the distributed search engine. And companies like i5 Digital and Gonesilent are
working on it now.
Final scenario—another true story. Call it Intel@work. In the early 1990s, even
though each processor generation was taking 10 to 40 times more processing
power to design and simulate than its predecessor, Intel quit buying mainframe
computers. Instead, the company began spreading the workload across all the
workstations in its then Californiawide, and now worldwide, engineering
network—a concept it calls NetBatch. Beginning with just a few hundred
workstations in 1990, NetBatch now coordinates the activities of more than
10,000 systems. When Israeli design personnel are asleep, California, Oregon,
and Texas engineers are using their computers' MIPs and memory. And vice
versa. Intel claims it recently hit greater than 80 percent average utilization of
the total available engineering computer resources, processing 2.7 million
queued jobs per month. And Intel says it has saved, oh, half a billion dollars in
the roughly 10 years NetBatch has been in place.
What's being harnessed in all these cases? Cheap LAN bandwidth, compared to
the WAN. Cheap client processors, compared to those in servers. And cheap
client mass storage, compared to server drive arrays. Slowly but surely, the
P2P advocates assert, the supercomputer and server are being rendered
irrelevant.
Power to the people
Thanks to the Napster stigma, however, P2P still seems like a dirty word to
some folks. Particularly if they're naturally resistant to change, reinforced with a
little corporate culture-injected risk-adversity. After all, P2P, even more than the
Internet before it, takes power away from the network owners and puts it in the
hands of network users.
The revolutionary tone taken by some P2P supporters, such as the following
bulleted list, taken verbatim from the Freenet home page, probably doesn't help
matters much in the buttoned-down worlds of Wall Street and Washington DC:
Freenet does not have any form of centralized control or administration.
It will be virtually impossible to forcibly remove a piece of information
from Freenet.
Both authors and readers of information stored on this system may
remain anonymous if they wish.
Information will be distributed throughout the Freenet network in such a
way that it is difficult to determine where information is being stored.
Anyone can publish information; they don't need to buy a domain name,
or even a permanent Internet connection.
Availability of information will increase in proportion to the demand for
that information.
Information will move from parts of the Internet where it is in low
demand to areas where demand is greater.
Computing revolutionaries like Linux and Apache happen to be doing very
well, though, thank you very much. And whether network managers
proactively embrace P2P or are dragged kicking and screaming towards it, they
will sooner or later have to face the reality that it is here to stay. "I think any IT
manager who fails to look at peer-to-peer should be fired," says Cheryl Currid,
president of technology research firm Currid and Company. "I can't think of an
organization that doesn't have a crying need for more MIPS or more storage."
It's not easy finding green
P2P is the latest in a long line of Internet-related acronyms and buzzwords.
Who can forget B2C, B2B, and push? Like its notorious predecessors, P2P is
in danger of being a technology long on hype and short on financial viability.
As Intel's self-proclaimed "peer-to-peer evangelist" Bob Knighten notes,
"Coming up with lots of ideas for using P2P is the easy part. Figuring out
how to make money with those ideas is the hard part."
Knighten sees industry collaboration and interoperability standards-setting as
necessary requirements in order to ensure a healthy environment for
innovation and growth. Or, as Endeavors Technology puts it, "The peering
infosphere of the next decade will be as rich and diverse as any natural
ecology. However, the engineering and technical challenges are as great as the
potential values suggested by the Sarnoff, Metcalfe, and Reed Laws."
Knighten hopes that his negotiating skills will be aided by the fact that most
P2P companies are small and therefore theoretically don't have much to gain
from proprietary activities.
Those small companies are backed by some big names, though. And that's the
catch. Investors may still be intoxicated by the zooming valuations of past
dot-com investments and hungry to make another quick buck, or battered by
past dot-COM investments and desperate to recoup their losses. Regardless,
they may force P2P startups to ignore their gut feel and go proprietary,
rolling the dice and gambling that by being first to market with the next killer
app, they'll follow in Microsoft's footsteps and become the de facto standard
for years to come. To use a baseball analogy, it's swinging for the fences with
the possibility of striking out, versus the safe single.
You've probably heard about Napster's truce with Bertelsmann AG.
Bertelsmann loans Napster 10s of millions of dollars to come up with a
subscription-based service. Upon completion of the service, Bertelsmann will
drop its lawsuit and open up its BMG Music catalog. Sounds good on paper.
But who's going to pay for content they can otherwise get for free through
original Napster or a dozen other file-swapping services? And what
watermarking or encryption technology is strong enough to prevent any
premium content BMG might have from falling into the hands of the
nonpaying masses? At least CenterSpan must think there's money to be made
here. The company paid $5 million for the assets of bankrupt file-swapping
developer Scour Exchange, which CenterSpan plans to reintroduce under a
subscription model sometime this year.
Sort through the business plans of the P2P pioneers, and you won't see much
of the notorious dot-com mantra, "We'll burn through cash building an
audience first, then later worry about how to make money." A few ideas
dominate. Some infrastructure providers hope to license their technology for
use by other companies, either internally or externally. This is analogous to a
computer software company licensing its game engine to other vendors, or a
search-engine provider selling licenses to ISPs or Intranet developers.
Idea No. 2 involves selling beefed-up versions of software that's free in its
basic form, or putting it on retail shelves for those users with slow Internet
connections or those unwilling to deal with the download hassle (something
Netscape tried and failed to do). Idea No. 3, for those P2P providers eyeing
the e-commerce arena, involves a cut of every transaction completed using
their software. And in idea No. 4, companies like Entropia hope to resell
users' otherwise-unused hard-drive space and processing power to
MIPS-hungry companies in financial, scientific, multimedia-development (Toy
Story III rendering, anyone?), and other industries. A few million
SETI@home users suggest there's a viable market for processing sharing, at
least for nonprofit endeavors. But the market opportunity of for-profit
resource-sharing applications is unclear at best. That's particularly true for
home and business users who are justifiably paranoid about unwanted
intrusions into their computers and networks.
The final worry, a nightmare that probably keeps every software developer
awake at least some nights, is that Microsoft will roll P2P functions into a
future iteration of its operating system, obliterating third-party projects in the
process. Guess we'll just have to see what the Department of Justice does
under a Republican administration, eh?
Peer review
Here's some sources of additional knowledge on the peer-to-peer trend.
One indication that an emerging technology has hit the big time is when
large conferences spring up focusing on the topic. Such is the case with
peer-to-peer computing, as evidenced by O'Reilly & Associates' Peer-to-Peer
Conference, which will take place February 14 to 16 in San Francisco
(conferences.oreilly.com). DCI is also running one, the Summit on
Peer-to-Peer Computing—same dates, same city, different hotel
(www.p2psummit.com).
Another sign of peer-to-peer's legitimacy is Intel's embrace of the technology.
In fact, Intel's Peer to Peer Computing Working Group site
(www.peer-to-peerwg.org) is a good jumping-off point for continued
research. What's more, Intel says it will be spending a sizeable chunk of its
upcoming Spring Developers Forum (February 27 to March 1 in San Jose)
on the topic.
Endeavors Technology's white paper "Peer-to-Peer Architectures and the
Magi Open-Source Infrastructure," an excellent read, is downloadable from
the vendor's Web site (www.endtech.com). The sites of the other vendors
mentioned in this article are also fine sources of information. But don't be
surprised if at least a few of them don't exist when you check them out. P2P
is a fast-moving technology. By the time you read this, perhaps a fourth of
the companies will have gone out of business in this now dot-com-adverse
investment environment, another quarter will have been acquired or will
have changed their name or focus, and new companies will have sprung up
to take their places. C'est la vie.
P2P is getting lots of press coverage, but aside from CommVerge (of
course), I'd also suggest you keep an eye on Red Herring, Upside, and
Wired. Red Herring devoted a considerable portion of its December 4,
2000, issue to P2P. And the "Guide to Global File Sharing" in Wired's
October 2000 issue provides a good set of links covering the file-swap
aspects of P2P.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:17:36 PDT