GRIDipedia – The European Grid Marketplace

Data Management Requirements

There are a number of common requirements which have been identified as important for data management:


These requirements are clearly very broad in scope and have been addressed to varying degrees by existing middleware. They all depend on what sort of data is involved and what will be done to the data. There is definitely room to improve the solutions currently available. There is also scope to extend them.As with any area of new technology, there are often many systems, each of which can provide part of a solution. Though a solution may exist for each sub-problem, it is not always possible to use one technology to produce the desired result.

Summary

There are a number of very different topics in the data management area.

Grid problems are often large in scale. This leads to a requirement that large amounts of information must be transferred quickly. Another requirement related to this is replication of data. There are two benefits, the potential to boost the transfer speed, and also redundancy of information in case a data source becomes unavailable.

Further problems emerge when dealing with multiple organisations and departments. Often there are multiple data sources in different locations. There is a requirement to make dealing with these resources as painless as possible. The problem becomes even more important when dealing with data sources which are heterogeneous. In this case it is beneficial to provide some abstraction to make the business logic and implementation more straightforward.

It is also of benefit to provide pieces of middleware to help address these common requirements to make it easier for business to gain benefit from grid developments.

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