An Investigation into Transport Protocols and Data Transport ...

Appendix A
Hardware Performance Tests
A.1 Data Storage
With the growth of Data Grids becoming important to enable processing of
large sets of data across the world, a fundamental question is where and how
the data is stored. In its simplest form, data may be stored on Desktop PC’s
which act as temporary scratch space for local processing. On the other hand,
regional centres and the like may have multiple storage options depending
on the importance of the data in question. As such, archived data may be
stored on cheap tape based systems, whilst more immediately required data
may be stored on large storage clusters such as RAID farms.
This section gives an overview of RAID technologies and gives examples
of existing performance limitations on such systems.
While it may be possible to make fast transfers across high bandwidth
networks, transfers of real data are limited by the rate at which end hosts
can read and write data to and from disk. This section demonstrates that
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