Entropy

There is a great article at arstechnica about using Bittorrent to roll out patches to 6500 machines. You can read more here.

The peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download most of the updates from each other—the remaining servers are mostly needed to send out the first few copies and then coordinate the up- and downloading. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth where it can find it: faster links are automatically used more.

Using this technology, updating all 6,500 PCs can be done in less than four hours. Previously, this took four days. Four days down to four hours for the same needs!

Its always nice to see some legitimate uses for a clever protocol.