Dancing with peer -to-peer

Peer-to-peer is growing up.

In addition to meeting demands for better collaboration, more flexible file sharing, and optimal use of existing resources, peer-to-peer technology is finding new roles to play in the enterprise. It has emerged from its emotion-charged past to become an integral part of the behind-the-scenes IT infrastructure.

The lack of centralized control in pure p-to-p systems scared off many enterprises from deploying the technology, but with a number of hybrid p-to-p models now available, companies can choose systems that allow a measure of control while still offering the benefits of p-to-p’s decentralized nature — benefits that extend far beyond desktop-to-desktop collaboration.

“Peer-to-peer is going to be one of those things that gets woven into the fabric of corporate life, as a way of doing things,” says Rob Batchelder, research director at Gartner in Stamford, Conn. “Peer-to-peer is as much a mind-set as anything else.”

Indeed, p-to-p is moving beyond collaboration and file sharing to serve as connective tissue in virtual datacenters and storage, BPM (business process management), and composite applications.

The benefits of p-to-p are getting attention. At the same time, companies seeking solutions in lean times may be more amenable to trying new things, says Derek Ruths, co-founder and CTO of Advanced Reality in Houston, which offers p-to-p collaboration.

“I think the way people capitalize on peer-to-peer more often than not is by not mentioning it, but [rather by quietly] taking advantage of the benefits it provides. We’re a case in point,” Ruths explains. “We don’t necessarily go around flaunting peer-to-peer, but it’s a core component to what we can provide. You don’t talk about peer-to-peer, you talk about usability, persistence, load and bandwidth balancing, and so on.”

Easier connections

Collaboration apps were early to take advantage of p-to-p’s ability to link people together on the fly so that they could share documents and information. P-to-p’s strengths are naturally suited for collaboration applications’ demands.

“Because it lacks the aspects of centralized control that tended to hamstring collaboration efforts in the past — directed collaboration is kind of an interesting oxymoron — [p-to-p] opens up all kinds of interesting collaborative efforts,” explains John Parkinson, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s chief technologist for the Americas, based in Chicago.

But the push now is to leverage p-to-p as a collaboration tool and to allow developers to add collaborative capabilities to other applications. Peer collaboration stalwart Groove is doing just that with its forthcoming Groove Toolkit for Visual Studio (VS) .Net and close connections to Microsoft and VS .Net. According to Andrew Mahon, senior director of product marketing at Beverly, Mass.-based Groove Networks, “By adding Groove or adding p-to-p capabilities to something they already know, people can see that usefulness, rather than just plugging in a new product and trying to figure out how it works.”

Advanced Reality’s Ruths also sees p-to-p extensions to existing apps as the next step for collaboration. The company’s Presence AR technology seeks to create a “contextual collaboration” platform by adding collaborative features to existing enterprise applications such as Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

“We focus on making the data collaborative and using applications more or less as windows into the collaboration,” Ruths explains, adding that his company dubs this a “managed peer-to-peer approach” because it establishes one person as responsible for each resource involved in the collaboration. This responsibility can be transferred among participants, so you would not lose access to resources if a group member goes offline.

Finally, Ruths notes that mobile devices will be critical to the future of p-to-p collaboration. “The idea of any device allowing me to join in and participate in whatever collaboration is going on” represents an opportunity for great productivity gains, he says, and it takes advantage of p-to-p’s strengths in delivering applications to the edge of the network. Groove’s forthcoming Groove Web Services addresses this, extending peer collaboration to mobile devices by wrapping pieces of the architecture in SOAP/WSDL interfaces(see ” Extending Groove ,” Nov. 4).

Beyond collaboration

Web services and p-to-p are shaping up to be complementary technologies. Infusing p-to-p into business applications allows them to directly tap what Web services are exposing for use, says Ira Lee, senior vice president of technology, R&D, at Metis Technology in New York. The company’s BPM tool, Metis Pathways, uses p-to-p as a framework to analyze and integrate process components from multiple, disparate applications.

According to analysts, pairing Web services with a p-to-p architecture could allow systems to “talk” to one another, even become triggers for application logic, message passing, and other processes. Plus, hybrid versions of p-to-p, as with Groove, mesh well with the registration needs of Web services and their UDDI directories.

“You may have a [p-to-p] architecture where there are centralized directories that don’t know everything, but they know where the other directories with information are,” says CGE&Y’s Parkinson. “If you make this architecture as flat as it can be but no flatter than it need be, you end up with something that has the advantages of peer-to-peer and the advantages of a protocol-driven, service-oriented architecture.”

Web services plus p-to-p could also play a strong role in helping companies use more of their unused resources by creating grids or distributed architectures that can link systems together or streamline information transfer processes. Wade Hennessey, CTO of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Kontiki, says many enterprises are realizing they have plenty of hardware infrastructure but lack the ability to capitalize on it.

“These fancy words, ‘grid computing’ and so forth, are really another way of saying, ‘I have a large number of interconnected resources that, if there’s an appropriate software infrastructure in place, can do an incredible amount of work,” Hennessey says. Kontiki offers secure, managed delivery of media and document files, using a grid of clients and servers in the network to deliver large files more efficiently. The delivery grid is built by deploying client software and forthcoming grid delivery servers, says Mark Szelenyi, Kontiki’s director of marketing.

“We used to think of our system as ‘peer-assisted delivery’ because the clients in the system could participate in the delivery,” Szelenyi explains. “By adding the grid delivery server to this entire grid that’s getting deployed, you could get many of the same benefits without having clients in the network — or maybe just having a subset of clients in the network — participate in the delivery.”

With a peer architecture “you can dynamically configure any process of application, and also dynamically deploy that application across whatever machine you’ve got,” says Mitch Davis, CEO of Metis Technology. “What that leads you to is the ability to optimize any given process or utilization of your hardware. The concept of underutilized hardware goes away in that kind of world.”

Into the future

Despite security concerns and a misunderstanding of p-to-p’s multiple forms and levels of control, the technology’s benefits for connecting people and resources and corralling systems and processing power are slowly emerging from the hype. Many think the next step for p-to-p lies in taking on more real-time functionality. “By definition, you’ve got a whole set of peers [in an enterprise], they’re just not necessarily integrated or interacting,” Metis’ Davis notes. “By deploying some kind of messaging infrastructure to make them work as peers, you can leverage any kind of composite application or composite process.”

As for the general trend, p-to-p seems to be moving into the background, where, as part of the enterprise fabric, it’s serving to connect various processes, applications, and systems. Kontiki’s Hennessey thinks the technology’s progression will lead to ubiquity.

“In the long run, it’s going to be part of your operating system. You’re not going to think twice about it,” Hennessey says.

Source: www.infoworld.com