Storage Management in the GRID

An application running on a Grid infrastructure needs to be able to transparently access distributed data available at some storage centers. The Grid middleware and infrastructure are responsible to reserve the necessary space, enforce local authorization policies, privacy and security, allow for transparent access to the underlying local storage system, etc. The goal and main contribution of this paper is to give an overview of the state of the art of storage management technologies in the Grid. Clear overviews are important in order to better drive the research evolution and for general guidance. We present a summary of hardware and software storage solutions adopted in various research centers part of the LHC Computing Grid infrastructure and the open problems to establish standards for "f"ile sharing" and a "master namespace server". Then we analyze the requirements for a Grid application, we present the Grid solutions proposed and the prototypes currently under test