A heterogeneous storage grid enabled by grid service

Abstract

Due to the explosive increase of data, storage Grid is a new model for deploying and managing storage resources distributed across multiple systems and networks, making efficient use of available storage capacity. Building a storage Grid demands corresponding protocols and standards to provide interoperability among the large number of heterogeneous storage systems. Service is becoming a basic application pattern of Grid because the service offers a standard means of interoperating between different applications running on a variety of platforms. This paper proposes a storage Grid architecture that wraps all distributed and heterogeneous storage resources into Grid services to provide transparent, remote, and on demand data access. The storage oriented Grid service can be considered as a basic building block of an infinite storage pool which provides good scalability through its inherent parallelism, and facilitates simple incremental resource expansion (to add storage resources, one just adds storage services). Grid users can stack simple modular storage service piece by piece as demand grows instead of buying monolithic storage systems. An implemented proof-of-concept prototype validates that the storage Grid architecture trade 5% (at most) performance degradation for an infinite and heterogeneous storage pool.