Services for replica consistency handling in data grids

The grid technology is a popular framework for collaborative, resource sharing computing infrastructure for many scientific domains. As wider scientific communities engage in the use of the grids, the view on the grid technology changes from the traditional high-performance computing perspective to a wider context. Data management is becoming one of the main areas of research interest in the scope of grid systems. In this paper, we present services for replica update propagation and consistency handling, which try to address the absence of software tools for maintaining the consistency among distributed data resources in a grid environment. We describe the architecture of the services as well as several important implementation details. We discuss the possibility of integration consistency handling services with legacy software and grid middleware services. This gives us the possibility to benefit from legacy software functionality and, in the same time, to increase the data availability and fault-tolerance by means of data replication.