Integration of Cloud Storage with Data Grids

Cloud computing is a new model of “computing on demand” that is emerging as an alternate to in-house computing. Users “buy” time on these compute-resources as needed without worrying about installing, maintaining or upgrading local infrastructure. Cloud computing is very useful and highly efficient for meeting peak loads, short-term demands, changing user base, and fault tolerance. In association with cloud computing, development has also occurred in the area of provisioning demand-based storage, called cloud storage. Cloud storage provides network-accessible storage capacity for storing files in a remote site. Like cloud computing, cloud storage is a service provided by third party where users pay for the storage that they use and bandwidth they consume when importing and exporting data from the cloud storage system. Cloud storage is useful for off-line storage of files (disaster recovery and fault tolerance), caching of data for cloud computing resources, meeting temporary storage spike needs, and for providing better and reliable web hosting services (load balancing). Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), Nirvanix and Rackspace Cloud are examples of storage cloud services.