New Evaluation Criterion of File Replicas Placement for Replication Strategies in Data Grids

Data grids provide distributed resources for dealing with large scale applications generating huge volume of data that require to be efficiently managed, shared and analyzed. Data replication is a useful technique to solve these tasks since it allows minimizing data access time through creating many replicas and storing them in appropriate locations. Several replication strategies have been proposed in the literature. The main idea of our work is to propose a new aspect of the evaluation of replication strategies which is the quality assessment of replicas placement in the data grid. In this paper, we prove the influence of the distribution of replicas through sites on the evaluation results. We then show the importance of evaluating the quality of the replicas distribution in data grids.