A dynamic replica management strategy in data grid

Abstract

Data Grid provides scalable infrastructure for storage resource and data files management, which supports several large scale applications. Due to limitation of available resources in grid, efficient use of the grid resources becomes an important challenge. Replication is a technique used in data grid to improve fault tolerance and to reduce the bandwidth consumption. This paper proposes a Dynamic Hierarchical Replication (DHR) algorithm that places replicas in appropriate sites i.e. best site that has the highest number of access for that particular replica. It also minimizes access latency by selecting the best replica when various sites hold replicas. The proposed replica selection strategy selects the best replica location for the users' running jobs by considering the replica requests that waiting in the storage and data transfer time. The simulated results with OptorSim, i.e. European Data Grid simulator show that DHR strategy gives better performance compared to the other algorithms and prevents unnecessary creation of replica which leads to efficient storage usage.