Storage Resource Managers: Middleware Components for Grid Storage

The amount of scientific data generated by simulations or collected from large scale experiments have reached levels that cannot be stored in the researcher’s workstation or even in his/her local computer center. Such data are vital to large scientific collaborations dispersed over wide-area networks. In the past, the concept of a Grid infrastructure [1] mainly emphasized the computational aspect of supporting large distributed computational tasks, and managing the sharing of the network bandwidth by using bandwidth reservation techniques. In this paper we discuss the concept of Storage Resource Managers (SRMs) as components that complement this with the support for the storage management of large distributed datasets. The access to data is becoming the main bottleneck in such “data intensive” applications because the data cannot be replicated in all sites. SRMs are designed to dynamically optimize the use of storage resources to help unclog this bottleneck.