“In a forest a tree will fade; from a forest a tree is made.” –Unknown

Over the past several years I’ve focused on application of P2P algorithms for the commercial space. Anyway, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts and tertiary research.

First, what is Peer-To-Peer (P2P)? P2P [URI] is a decentralized, fault tolerant, self-organizing system architecture comprised of many unreliable and heterogeneous nodes operating in a functionally symmetric manner—frequent joins and leaves are the norm. P2P is not a client / server architecture. P2P is a paradigm shift from coordination to cooperation, from centralization to decentralization, and from control to incentives.

When defining an information model, should one favor an abstract or concrete design? The short answer is neither.

Generally speaking, the life of any distributed system directly relates to its level of entropy. Furthermore, the level of entropy in a system directly relates to the system’s computational complexity. When designing applications to solve business problems, information storage and retrieval is one of the more important foundational design points. If the information schema is designed without efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in mind then not only will the system perform poorly but it will not meet the requirements imposed by future business demands.

BitVault (defined) is a very interesting distributed data retention platform architecture from Microsoft Research. You can read the research paper here. Another interesting bit of news is an eWeek article documenting a Microsoft announcement of the productizing of BitVault.

A colleague and I discussed the value in using a 64 bit Update Sequence Number (USN) versus a 128 bit USN. Here are my thoughts assuming 64-bits.

To provide a bit of context, we were considering a solution space that incremented the USN value for each write operation for a specific set of protected data. The USN is 64 bits, and is advanced for each update on a given server. At 100 writes per second, the USN will roll over in 58,494,241,735 years (approximately).