Networking in the New Millennium: Business Applications for Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing

With the introduction of Napster in 1999, 18-year-old Shawn Fanning showed the world the power of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. Even though Napster did not survive, P2P continued to live on and flourish. While the focus has been on the personal use of P2P computing, businesses have started to find ways to take advantage of the P2P model in their organizations. P2P proponents forecast that businesses can save billions of dollars by implementing P2P into their networking environments. An extension of P2P computing is grid computing. While grid computing was initially used for scientific and academic research, the past two years have seen a significant increase in the use of grid computing by commercial institutions. The main objective of this paper is to investigate how peer-to-peer and grid computing systems have been taken out of the scientific, academic, and personal usage environments and successfully applied in business environments.