Citation:
Yuhui Deng, Frank Wang; LAG: Achieving transparent access to legacy data by leveraging grid environment, Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 27, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 32-39
Abstract:
The world today is experiencing an explosive growth of data generated by
information digitization. Due to the unprecedented advance in software and
hardware, large amounts of data gradually becomes legacy data and inaccessible.
This is building a digital black hole, and it is becoming a big challenge to
access, process, and preserve the legacy data. Grid provides flexible, secure,
and coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals,
institutions, and resources. It allows users and applications to access the
aggregated resources in a transparent manner. This paper proposes a Legacy
Application Grid (LAG) architecture. This architecture deploys diverse legacy
applications in a grid environment and provides a transparent access to the
remote LAG users who want to access the legacy data. In contrast to the existing
methods which attempt to tackle legacy data and legacy applications, we wrap a
display protocol into grid services. The service provider, who wants to deploy
any legacy applications, just needs to deploy the protocol based grid service,
describe and pass the parameters of those legacy applications to the service.
Compared with the traditional approaches, the method proposed in this paper is
very cost-effective because it avoids converting legacy data from one format to
another format or upgrading legacy applications one by one. An implemented
prototype validates that the LAG architecture trades acceptable performance
degradation for a transparent and remote access to legacy data. (C) 2010
Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
