The International Testbed of the CrossGrid Project has been in operation for the last three years, including 16 sites in 9 countries across Europe. The main achievements in installation and operation are described, and also the substantial experience gained on providing support to application and middleware developers in the project. Results are presented showing the availability of a realistic Grid framework to execute distributed interactive and parallel jobs.

Stripping techniques combined with an adequate replication policy across the Grid offer the possibility to improve significatively data access and processing times, while eliminating the need for local data mirroring, so saving significatively on storage costs. First results on a local cluster following a simple strategy are presented.