Storage management systems for organizationally distributed environments PLGrid PLUS case study

Abstract

With the increasing amount of data the research community is facing problems with methods of effectively accessing, storing, and processing data in large scale and geographically distributed environments. This paper addresses major data management issues, in particular use cases and scenarios (on the basis of Polish research community organized around the PLGrid PLUS Project) and discusses architectures of data storage management systems available in both PL-Grid and other similar federated environments. On that basis, a concept of a new meta storage system, named VeilFS, is presented. The proposed system unifies file access methods for geographically distributed large scale systems and hides complexity of data access and management in such environments. However, it should be emphasized that the main purpose of this article is identification and discussion about users' requirements and existing solutions. The VeilFS system will be described in detail in the future. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.