The Power of Peer to Peer

The Super Peer

Over the years, I have seen some companies take an innovative approach to resource sharing in a dedicated Peer to Peer environment. Since the cost of individual machines and peripherals has dropped so low, it is easy to purchase and configure "Super Peers" that serve primarily as shared workstations, but can also become productivity stations should the need arise. For instance, one well configured workstation in each "cluster" of employees can be host to a scanner, a CD-RW drive with burn-proof technology, a color printer, a high-volume black and white laser printer and perhaps even a plotter and a tape backup device. Thanks to USB, it is quite easy to configure and share multiple printers and plotters on that one Super Peer station, making them readily available to those with network access.

The unit can be outfitted with large IDE drives for very little cost and also used as a data storage and backup point in that shared environment. You could easily purchase three additional 100 gigabyte IDE drives for less than $900 and allow some of the space be used for personal folders, project folders and more. You could even designate some of the space for a data clearing house, where employees may transfer entire projects to another group by copying all of the relevant files to the Super Peer drive and allowing that other group to move them onto another local machine. Employees could store completed files in a read-only project archive so that they could be made available to all other employees with access to that share.

If you need a series of document scanned, you could simply sit down at the Super Peer station, complete the task, store the data in a shared folder and access it from your individual workstation. You could copy your data from your machine to a shared folder, head over to the Super Peer and burn it on to a CD-R that you can then mail off to a client. Employees can store backup copies of their important data files on the Super Peer drives and thanks to the miracle of scheduled backups, can be archived nightly to the DAT drive attached to that same Super Peer station. I have even seen one small company equip the Super Peer with a Matrox G400-TV capture card and a VCR and use it to digitize video they shot for the creation of a safety training video. They encoded the video, stored it on a shared drive and then edited a local copy of the movie on a separate workstation with their own copy of Adobe Premier. It worked surprisingly well.

In addition to all of this, the Super Peer can be used by employees or contractors as a temporary overflow workstation. It can even be used to host demonstrations for visiting clients should the need arise. With this particular configuration, you have a great deal of flexibility and a significant reduction in the overhead costs normally associated with a true Server. Client licensing is a non-issue, for example.

Things To Keep An Eye On

It is possible that administering this configuration may not be easy at times and it is certainly not going to give you the level of security that you may need in some situations. However, for many small companies where security is not a heavy concern, such as an architectural firm where they share CAD drawings, or a graphic design firm where they may share bitmaps and vector files with each other during the development of a flyer or brochure, a Super Peer configuration can be more than adequate and can provide growing companies as a way to "ease into" a Client / Server hybrid model should that need later become a reality.

It may be necessary to remind employees from time to time that the Super Peer is designed to be a supplement to their individual stations, not as a replacement. Critical files should still be stored primarily on individual machines, with a copy being placed on the shared drive. Employees should not use those shared folders as a data source while actively creating and editing files, but as an extra place to store backups of your data once you are through manipulating it.

You may want to designate one or two key people be the focal point for questions and requests to help keep the potential problems to a minimum. You would not, for example, want to encourage individual employees to install additional applications on the Super Peer. You may instead want to ensure that they touch base with one of those key people and make the request so that it can be taken care of in an orderly way at a time when it is least likely to impact other workers. You may also want to assign those personnel some general system maintenance tasks to ensure that the Super Peer continues to function as expected and maintains a high rate of up-time. You may also want to outfit that machine with a solid Uninterruptible Power Supply with Automatic Voltage Regulation to help keep problems to a minimum.