Policy driven data management in pl-grid virtual organizations

Abstract

In this chapter, we intend to introduce a novel approach to data management within the Grid environment based on user-defined storage policies. This approach aims at enabling Grid application developers to specify requirements concerning storage elements which will be exploited by the application during runtime. Most of the existing Grid middleware focus on unifying access to available storage elements, e.g. by applying various virtualization techniques. While this is suitable for many Grid applications, there is a category of applications, namely the data-intensive one which often has more specific needs. The chapter outlines research and development work carried out in the PL-GRID and OntoStor projects to solve this issue within the PL-GRID infrastructure.