M$ creates P2P application called BitVault

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Microsoft leverages P2P technology to create BitVault
4/5/2006 5:20:05 PM, by Jeremy Reimer

Microsoft Research consists of over 700 people in five separate labs all over the world, from Redmond to Bangladore. The team has come up with some interesting technologies over the years, although some of them wound up being more fanciful than practical. Recently, the team in Beijing has come up with an interesting project called BitVault: a "content-addressable retention platform for large volumes of data."

BitVault is a distributed application that runs on multiple PCs, called "bricks." Each brick is a bare-bones PC with a large hard drive, and hundreds or even thousands of bricks can be connected together to run the application. BitVault then allows users to search for information that is stored anywhere on the brick network, and guarantees that the data will be valid even if it has been modified or deleted on some of the bricks.

BitVault works using a principle called Distributed Hash Tables (DHT), a technology that played a key role in recent decentralized P2P applications such as Bittorrent. A single file need not be completely stored on a single computer in order for all the others to have access to it as long as each individual piece of the file is stored somewhere, the complete file can be retrieved. BitVault stores data as immutable "objects," with a 160-bit key used as the handle to retrieve them. As long as a single valid copy of an object survives, the system can repair damaged copies on all other bricks in the system. Automatic network load balancing ensures that the system is scalable and remains accessible even if many of the bricks are damaged or inaccessible.

Read the full story @ arstechnica.