DATA REPLICATION STRATEGIES IN WIDE AREA DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS Authors:

Effective data management in today’s competitive enterprise environment is an important issue. Data is information; and information is knowledge. Hence, fast and effective access to data is very important. Replication is one such widely accepted phenomenon in distributed environment, where data is stored at more than one site for performance and reliability reasons. Applications and architecture of distributed computing has changed drastically during last decade and so has replication protocols. Different replication protocols may be suitable for different applications. In this manuscript we present a survey of replication algorithms for different distributed storage and content management systems ranging from distributed Database Management Systems, Service-oriented Data Grids, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Systems, and Storage Area Networks. We discuss the replication algorithms of more recent architectures, Data Grids and P2P systems, in details. We briefly discuss replication in storage area network and Internet.