ManageSoft Announces SmartPeer Software Management
Multi-site remote networks benefit with easier installs, server-less management and lower costs
September 20, 2006 Boston, MA, USA
ManageSoft Corporation today announced the availability of release 7.8 of its flagship software management and compliance suite. This release incorporates SmartPeer™ collaboration for effortless scaling of centralized software control over tens of thousands of remote sites with low-bandwidth or intermittent connections.
This quantum leap in software distribution has proven itself in verticals like retail, restaurant, postal services, and banking - anywhere with large numbers of separate locations, each with relative small LANs of desktop or mobile computers needing ongoing software and easy management from a central headquarters. The highly-efficient solution is ideal where there are intermittent, slow, or poor quality connections (such as a dial-up modem) between central administration and remote offices. Most importantly, it does not require any server - or any additional system administration resource - in the remote locations, ensuring that business is not disrupted by local server failures.
Standards Driven
So effective is the technique that it has already been granted an official port by the governing Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for its low-overhead LDSS (Local Download Sharing Service) protocol, and a plug-in for the publicly-available Ethereal suite and WireShark which allows detailed analysis and monitoring of its very low levels of related network traffic.
How It Works
SmartPeer collaboration avoids the network-hogging pitfalls of traditional peer-to-peer networking, and also sidesteps the limitations of multicasting, which is blocked by standard routers and requires all clients turned on and receiving at the same time. With SmartPeer collaboration, every managed device remains completely autonomous, and can apply a centrally-defined software policy uniquely tuned for its individual purpose. Yet all the managed devices within a given LAN (or subnet) have a 'shared mind' about which of them is planning to collect which software, files and by when, to share precious bandwidth within permitted time windows. The autonomy of each device means that the disappearance of any managed device, whether through failure or replacement, does not cause any download impact for the other machines. Since the collaboration is intelligent and adaptive, it transparently supports mobile devices, which may be connecting to various LANs or remote offices.
Since each SmartPeer managed device can mix and match individual files from any peer device to achieve its desired state specified in the corporate software policy, WAN traffic is limited to a single software download per location, even when the remote location supports hundred of managed devices - and without the significant number of missed-packet retries typical of multicasting. The system is also incredibly robust and business-friendly, with byte-level resumption of interrupted transfers, network throttling for WAN and LAN, and disk rate limiting to ensure that primary business is not disrupted.
Because ManageSoft technology ensures file integrity and match to policy, there is no increased security risk, and no possibility of any peer device poisoning the system with bogus files. Whether there is on-going need for individual files is also constantly checked against policy, with outdated files being automatically removed from the local cache.
A unique strength of SmartPeer collaboration is that it can be turned on and off for whole groups of computers by a simple policy change at the central console. This means that SmartPeer collaboration can very simply be mixed and matched with existing light-weight hierarchies of distribution servers for those enterprises that combine large office LANs with small and remote offices.
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