Opportunities and challenges of storage grid enabled by grid service

Abstract

The explosive growth of data generated worldwide by information digitization has been identified as the key driver of storage system evolution. In this paper, we discuss the existing storage system architectures and pose the challenges they are facing. Drawing inspiration from Grid computing community, we propose to design a storage Grid enabled by Grid service which can solve the scalability and heterogeneity problems. However, the challenging Internet involved in the storage Grid incurs some emerging problems including the limited network performance, the unstable network environment, and etc. The Grid service involved in the storage Grid introduces much larger overhead which may result in low performance and inefficient utilization of storage resources. Because Grid service is designed for loosely coupled systems, we argue that the storage Grid can employ Grid service as a glue to manage, monitor and locate the Internet-scale storage resources which are transparent to users, while still adopting binary code to transfer data to maintain the performance. Some other solutions which may alleviate the performance pressure of Grid service and increase the efficiency of storage resource utilization are discussed as well.