Justin, of Onion Networks, talks about “the swarming Web.”

Standard http, he says, doesn’t work well for transferring large files: You have a 64% chance of failure if you transfer a gigabyte. (Here’s his “large file hall of shame“.)

“Swarming” is like RAID for Web content. Even as bandwidth increases, we need more reliable servers. And better make ’em fault tolerant. And he doesn’t like setting up mirrors because it’s a bad experience for users. Instead Onion Networks uses swarming — the technique BitTorrent uses — as a native Web format. “It’s ad hoc, Self-provisioning, it scales on demand.” It adds a few simple elements to http headers.

There’s a free public version… [Technorati tag: etech]

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