Dutch university thinks bittorrent is greatest thing since sliced bread

March 7th, 2008 · No Comments

Animation of bittorrent doing its thing

Torrentfreak posts that dutch University INHOLLAND now uses bittorrent to distribute software updates to its desktop computers:

According to an article in the weekly Dutch magazine Automatiserings Gids, the Dutch university INHOLLAND uses BitTorrent as a network management tool to distribute software to 6500 desktop computers in 16 different locations throughout the Netherlands. Instead of distributing software updates and images from several centralized servers, INHOLAND now utilities the efficiency of BitTorrent, and uses all the computers in the network to help distribute the files.

Before they decided to use BitTorrent, more than 20 servers were needed to distribute 25.6 TBs of data to the desktops, and even then it could take up to 4 days to update them all. Now, with BitTorrent, this process has speeded up significantly, and all computers are updated with the latest software in less than 4 hours. The data doesn’t have to be distributed from one location, since all the workstations connected to the network actively help in the distribution.

Finally, the “mainstream” is coming to it’s senses and is seeing that bittorrent can save them time, bandwidth & therefore money. It’s still a shame though that it takes them this long to accept & use something so obviously useful.