A Mass storage solution for Grid environments

In several scientific areas the use of large datasets is growing fast, e.g. data from High Energy experiments, Earth Observation, Astronomical Observation, and Biological databases. This requires the use of mass storage systems for managing these data. In grid environments user applications are not tied anymore to a particular system, but can run on a group of geographically distributed hosts. We will describe the integration and use of a mass storage system in the grid environment of the European Datagrid project, where data is transparently accessible for the end user. In conclusion we will discuss the role of network performance.