Data Management in Distributed Systems: A Scalability Taxonomy

Abstract

Data management is a key aspect of any distributed system. This paper surveys data management techniques in various distributed systems, starting from Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. The central focus is on scalability, an important non-functional property of distributed systems. A scalability taxonomy of data management techniques is presented. Detailed discussion of the evolution of data management techniques in the different categories as well as the state of the art is provided. As a result, several open issues are inferred including use of P2P techniques in data grids and distributed mobile systems and the use of optimal data placement heuristics from Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for P2P grids.