Improving Data Grids Performance by using Modified Dynamic Hierarchical Replication Strategy

A Data Grid connects a collection of geographically distributed computational and storage resources that enables users to share data and other resources. Data replication, a technique much discussed by Data Grid researchers in recent years creates multiple copies of file and places them in various locations to shorten file access times. In this paper, a dynamic data replication strategy, called Modified Dynamic Hierarchical Replication (MDHR) is proposed. This strategy is an enhanced version of Dynamic Hierarchical Replication (DHR). However, replication should be used wisely because the storage capacity of each Grid site is limited. Thus, it is important to design an effective strategy for the replication replacement task. MDHR replaces replicas based on the last time the replica was requested, number of access, and size of replica. It selects the best replica location from among the many replicas based on response time that can be determined by considering the data transfer time, the storage access latency, the replica requests that waiting in the storage queue, the distance between nodes and CPU process capability. Simulation results utilizing the OptorSim show MDHR achieves better performance overall than other strategies in terms of job execution time, effective network usage and storage usage.