? On Using Bittorrent As A Sw Distribution Medium

[a31modela]

Hello All,

 

Noob to bittorrent and was hoping I could get some thoughts on something.  We send software packages  to a large number ( over 500 ) of wan locations ( suse 11 )  We are currently using a commercial multicast medium to get our packages to the wan locations.  Multicast has been a pain in the butt.  Looking for alternatives and thought bittorrent may be an option. 

 

We need a quick, reliable method of getting our packages to our wan locations.  Some of the packages are over 600M in size and we usually trickle it @ 32k due to bandwidth constraints with other stuff going on.

 

Would bittorrent be a viable option for us? We normally multicast from a single server here out to the wan to different groups.  We would still need to use the group method of deployment since we send to a test group of 10, then 25, then 75 before we send to all.  Could bittorrent do all this for us?

 

We have a reliable package build method, I just need to get the package out to the wan locations. 

 

Appreciate your help !

 

Steve

[Harold Feit]

BitTorrent would generate validation segments that would, when sent to the remote machine, be validated and once validated would be uploaded to other machines in the swarm.

The mirroring that would happen would be partial until each given node is complete then would become full afterwards.

Additionally, the participation in the network is dynamic.

 

The speed that individual pieces go out isn't relevant to the reliability of the data sent out. It will affect how fast packages get from your source system, but once done there,

 

If you need to scale your deployment, bittorrent can do what you need there as well. All you need to do is add the additional system(s) to the appropriate swarms.

 

Are your packages going to be distributed in groups or individually?

[a31modela]

Hello Harold,

Thanks for the reply.  We send out software packages to groups.  All we need is a delivery medium, our software package build and execution piece works great.  All of our locations are maintain an identical configuration for the servers.  We typically send out to a group of 20, let it run for a day or so, then to a group of 75 and when everything looks good, to the rest of the servers.  Although we would have the same package sent to every server, we never send to it to all at once.

 

So I guess what you are saying is we would have multiple swarms, which would act as seperate groups so we could scale the distribution as needed.

 

Regards,

Steve

[Harold Feit]

Ideally, if you're distributing to have complete mirrors, you would have a single torrent of your entire file tree and distribute that. Adding as many servers as you want to have the complete mirror as you can as early as you can in the distribution.

 

You make additional torrents when you make a new package set and seed that from a machine that has a byte-identical set of the files. It does not necessarily need to be the same machine that made the files or the torrent. It just needs the byte-identical copy.

 

You don't need to make additional torrents to add additional servers, nor do you have to wait the day or two for the files to become up to date to add servers. Just leave ALL the machines that are getting a copy of these files running on the torrent until the last one is complete (if possible).