Online music service Napster on Wednesday unveiled an application using IBM technology to help universities and other customers save computing bandwidth and money. Napster, owned by digital media company Roxio, said its new "Super Peer" application uses International Business Machine Corp.'s eServer BladeCenter systems to store popular songs from Napster in on-site servers rather than from the Internet.

The most popular tracks in the Napster system are stored locally, enabling customers like The University of Rochester and Penn State University, to reduce their computing infrastructure's vulnerability to overuse.

With the new application, about 90 percent of these downloads and streams would not result in traffic across the open Internet, saving the university an estimated $50,000 in bandwidth fees in the first year.