"People today have a little confusion about storage grids and their definition," Francis says. That's probably an understatement.

Many storage vendors claim to have a "grid" solution, but the lack of a commonly-accepted definition of a storage grid means the grid solutions group is made up of strange bedfellows: virtualization solutions, parallel file systemsolutions, and various flavors of clustered storage, to name just a few.

The authoritative doesn't even mention storage grids. Searching the site does dig up some interesting documents, however, such as this otherwise that defines a storage grid as "A unified, managed infrastructure that leverages grid-computing concepts to present a single, utility-like storage system".That's a definition thatcan fit many systems, in my opinion.

Definitions apart, iGrid creates a network of independent nodes between servers and storage, all based on 64-bit commodity servers and running the Crosswalk proprietary iGrid OS.

"We load-balance the access from all servers in case of unequal load distribution or if there is a failure," Francis explains, adding that the storage on the back-end of iGrid appears to the host systems like an easy-to-manage single pool, serving NFS or CIFS files systems very quickly. Crosswalk has a surprisingly technically rich online that better describes how the system works.