This information is for a release that is no longer supported by the Globus Toolkit. The currently supported versions of the Globus Toolkit are 4.2 (recommended) and 4.0.
Data Management Documentation
The following links will take you to documentation for the data management components of the Globus Toolkit:
GridFTP is a high-performance, secure, reliable data transfer protocol optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area networks. The GridFTP protocol is based on FTP, the highly-popular Internet file transfer protocol. We have selected a set of protocol features and extensions defined already in IETF RFCs and added a few additional features to meet requirements from current data grid projects.
The Reliable File Transfer Service (RFT) is an OGSA based service that provides interfaces for controling and monitoring 3rd party file transfers using GridFTP servers. The client controlling the transfer is hosted inside of a grid service so it can be managed using the soft state model and queried using the ServiceData interfaces available to all grid services. It is essentially a reliable and recoverable version of the GT2 globus-url-copy tool and more.
The Replica Location Service (RLS) maintains and provides access to mapping information from logical names for data items to target names. These target names may represent physical locations of data items, or an entry in the RLS may map to another level of logical naming for the data item.