Branch Replication Scheme: A New Model for Data Replication in Large Scale Data Grids Articles uri icon

publication date

  • January 2010

start page

  • 12

end page

  • 20

issue

  • 1

volume

  • 26

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0167-739X

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1872-7115

abstract

  • Data replication is a practical and effective method to achieve efficient and fault-tolerant data access in grids. Traditionally, data replication schemes maintain an entire replica in each site where a file
    is replicated, providing a read-only model. These solutions require
    huge storage resources to store the whole set of replicas and do not
    allow efficient data modification to avoid the consistency problem. In
    this paper we propose a new replication method, called the Branch Replication Scheme
    (BRS), that provides three main advantages over traditional approaches:
    optimizing storage usage, by creating subreplicas; increasing data
    access performance, by applying parallel I/O techniques; and providing
    the possibility to modify the replicas, by maintaining consistency among
    updates in an efficient way. An analytical model of the replication
    scheme, naming system, and replica updating scheme are formally
    described in the paper. Using this model, operations such as reading,
    writing, or updating a replica are analyzed. Simulation results
    demonstrate the feasibility of BRS, as they show that the new
    replication algorithm increases data access performance, compared with
    popular replication schemes such as hierarchical and server-directed
    replication, which are commonly used in current data grids.