Walking the last mile
Envive, first started thinking about P2P six months ago. The management services provider offers self-service monitoring and load testing of Web sites at www.envive.com. Envive's problem is that, while it can easily monitor performance of the data centers and huge data pipes of a service provider such as Concentric Network, it's much more difficult to measure the performance that end users on the Internet actually see. That's because the servers Envive is watching aren't in the so-called last mileâ€"that last jog from a Web site to a user's machine, which may be using anything from a fat digital subscriber line to a slowly churning 28.8K-bps connection.
That's where Distributed Science's "for-pay" distributed network of 145,000 global peers comes in. Distributed Science, solicits individuals to offer up their PCs' resources for various processing projects such as Envive's. A commercial version of well-known P2P projects such as SETI@Home, the Distributed Science network will eventually pay participants an average of US12.50 per month. This extensive network of peers means that wherever Envive needs testing done, Distributed very likely has a peer located.
Again, the low cost of deployment comes into the picture in this P2P setup. "We get greater accuracy, more locations, at a fraction of the cost," said Jeff Tonkel, CEO of Envive, who declined to say how much this rollout, announced last month, cost. Tonkel did say, however, that the infrastructure cost would have amounted to "at least five times" what Envive paid to tap into the P2P network.
