Short for Storage Resource Broker, SRB is an open distributed data management software facility developed at the University of California at San Diego. It is used with ResearchChannel’s DigitalWell digital asset management system to facilitate federated interoperation with other leading digital library systems and data grids.
In a SRB architecture, the components don't do method calls on each other's interface, and they even don't have to know the exact API of the interface. Instead, the client launches a request for a service (often also called a transaction) the SRB middleware interprets this request, looks for a server that can deliver the service, translates the client request in a format that the server can understand, connects to the server to start the execution, and returns the result to the client. The request and the answer consist of one single data structure, so the granularity with which client and server talk to each other is much larger than in the ORB case. This reduces the overhead of method calling over the network, and it relieves the server from the burden of keeping state information about the client. Moreover, changing the interface of a server doesn't require recompilation of its clients, because only the middleware must be informed about the changes. This can be done by simple adaptation of description files, without recompilation.
Storage Resource Broker, SDSC middleware for management of heterogeneous data over a network, used internally by the SSDB to store the objects uploaded by IODP proponents click here