A survey of dynamic replication strategies for improving data availability in data grids

Data grid is a distributed collection of storage and computational resources that are not boundedwithin a geophysical location. It is a fast growing area of research and providing efficient data access andmaximum data availability is a challenging task. To achieve this task, data is replicated to different sites. A number of data replication techniques have been presented for data grids. All replication techniques address some attributes like fault tolerance, scalability, improved bandwidth consumption, performance, storage consumption, data access time etc. In this paper, different issues involved in data replication are identified and different replication techniques are studied to find out which attributes are addressed in a given technique andwhich are ignored. A tabular representation of all those parameters is presented to facilitate the future comparison of dynamic replication techniques. The paper also includes some discussion about future work in this direction by identifying some open research problems. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.