An important consideration for many businesses is the stability of their data resources. It is important to always have access to your data. One approach to this is to replicate the data you wish to access. In this way, a single failure does not prevent access to your data. Another option is to disperse the data among a number of machines, meaning one failure only makes a portion of the data unavailable, not all of it. There are a number of existing middleware for data management which do not currently support replication. GT4 does support replication through the Data Replication Service but it is only a technical preview. OGSA-DAI does not currently have support for replication. SRB on the other hand does have replication support. Extending a piece of middleware to support replication would certainly provide benefits to business users who want to deploy a grid solution.
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