Using BitTorrent for Patch Management

BitTorrent has been getting a lot of press recently with regards to the amount of illegal activity that is associated with this tool. Many companies and universities have banned it from their organizations to limit liability.

The fact is that BitTorrent has many legitimate uses and is a very powerful tool. One such use comes from using BitTorrent to manage patches or software updates to thousands of workstations spread across various locations. A Dutch university recently patched over 6,500 servers/workstations across 10 locations in less than 4 hours. In the past this procedure would have taken over 4 days! The amount of updates include 3.5GB for each machine. That would total over 22TB of data.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file and bandwidth sharing network. This peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download updates from each other. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth efficiently. It finds paths that are least loaded and uses those first. This way loads are balanced and throughput is optimized. While most people are familiar with the idea of P2P file sharing (i.e. making files on your own PC available to others on a network) the concept of bandwidth sharing is not well understood. BitTorrent is an enabling technology. It enables small Web or file servers to host large amounts of files for download without thus balancing the load of multiple incoming connections and without consuming expensive bandwidth.

BitTorrent comprises both a client/server software and a protocol. There are several BitTorrent clients each with their own features/benefits. A simple google search should yield you plent of results.

When you download a BitTorrent file (called a "torrent") you will most likely not download all of the files from the server that you think your linked to. Instead you will begin to download pieces of that file(s) from a variety of BitTorrent servers that have the file(s) you're interested in. Specialized algorithms are in place to help optimize the bandwidth being used (e.g. download file from server that is closest to you).

By running BitTorrent on your machine you turn your machine into a BitTorrent server. This means that you will automatically upload pieces of the file that you have downloaded while continuing to retrieve the rest of the file from the other servers. This helps reduce the load on the main server by distributing small pieces of the file to many distributed machines instead of one central repository.

BitTorrent clients have built-in policies that allow it to give preference to servers that have the most bandwidth and the most pieces of the file. The goal is the get the file to the client more efficiently, quicker, and more reliably that they would have otherwise been able to.

I can easily see how BitTorrent can be a key enabler of various IT initiatives. Any initiative that has bandwidth constraints could use BitTorrent to solve the challenges. This not only include patch management, but also software updates, new OS releases, developer updates, indexing/searching, to name a few.

BitTorrent is indeed a powerful tool. But "with great power comes great responsibility".

Vassilios
--
http://www.outervillage.com

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Vassilios
Co-Founder
OuterVillage.com
http://outervillage.com

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