Incorporation of client storage into a storage system
Granted: October 9, 2012
Patent Number:
8285747
Embodiments of the present invention are directed to an apparatus and methods for operating a storage system. The storage system incorporates a storage device associated with a client into a logical group of storage devices managed by the storage system. Thereafter, the storage system is capable of satisfying data access requests from an incorporated storage device managed by the storage system.
Migration engine for use in a logical namespace of a storage system environment
Granted: October 9, 2012
Patent Number:
8285817
A migration engine is provided for use in a logical namespace of a storage system environment. A remote agent of an integrated management framework is installed on a host machine of the storage system environment and includes a pre-installed migration plug-in module that configures the agent as a migration engine adapted to provide a data migration capability. That is, the migration plug-in has the intelligence to configure the remote agent as a migration engine adapted to perform data…
System and method for preprocessing a data set to improve deduplication
Granted: October 9, 2012
Patent Number:
8285957
The technique introduced here includes a system and method for preprocessing a data set to improve deduplication, and more specifically for reducing latency. The technique illustratively utilizes one or more preprocessing steps, including a “skipping” step and a “folding” step, which can be applied to a data set prior to deduplication to reduce the time consumed by deduplication. The folding step is applied to segments of the data set to reduce the length of the segments. The…
Method for placement of virtual volume hot-spots in storage pools using ongoing load measurements and ranking
Granted: October 9, 2012
Patent Number:
8285959
The present invention is directed to a method for providing data element placement in a storage system via a Dynamic Storage Tiering (DST) mechanism, such that improved system efficiency is promoted. For example, the DST mechanism may implement an algorithm for providing data element placement. The data elements (ex.—virtual volume hot-spots) may be placed into storage pools, such that usage of higher performing storage pools is maximized. Hot-spots may be detected by dynamically…
System and method for establishing a shared secret among nodes of a security appliance
Granted: October 9, 2012
Patent Number:
8285993
A method for distributing a shared secret key among a plurality of nodes is described. Each node establishes a secret key, the number of nodes being more than two nodes. A node distributes by a ring protocol executing over computer network connections an encrypted version of the secret key of each node to other nodes of the plurality of nodes. Each node decrypts the secret keys of other nodes so that each node has the secret key of other nodes. Each node combines the secret keys of other…
System and method for management of jobs in a cluster environment
Granted: October 9, 2012
Patent Number:
8286179
A system and method for management of jobs in the clustered environment is provided. Each node in the cluster executes a job manager that interfaces with a replicated database to enable cluster wide management of jobs within the cluster. Jobs are queued in the replicated database and retrieved by a job manager for execution. Each job manager ensures that jobs are processed through completion or, failing that, are re-queued on another storage system for execution.
System and method for file system level compression using compression group descriptors
Granted: October 9, 2012
Patent Number:
8285687
A system and method for transparently compressing file system data using compression group descriptors is provided. When data contained within a compression group be compressed beyond a predefined threshold value, a compression group descriptor is included in the compression group that signifies that the data for the group of level 0 blocks is compressed into a lesser number of physical data blocks. When performing a read operation, the file system first determines the appropriate…
System and method for real-time deduplication utilizing an electronic storage medium
Granted: October 2, 2012
Patent Number:
8281066
The present invention provides a system and method for eliminating duplicate data (de-duplication) in substantially real time using an electronic storage medium.
End-to-end LUN management via standards compliant management interfaces
Granted: September 25, 2012
Patent Number:
8275886
A storage system to be used by a host is automatically configured using an agent running at a management console communicatively coupled to the host and to the storage system. In response to probes initiated by the agent, information regarding the host and the storage system, which information is required for the host and the storage system to establish a connection therebetween is obtained and is provided to the host and the storage system. Thereafter, the agent instructs the host and…
Provisioning data storage entities with authorization settings
Granted: September 25, 2012
Patent Number:
8276191
A method and system for generating authorization settings that indicate whether host administrators using a host-based storage-management application are authorized to perform provisioning operations on data storage entities residing on a data storage system are disclosed. Accordingly, a storage-management application receives from an administrator an authorization setting indicating on a per-user basis a set of provisioning operations which can be performed with a data storage entity…
Method and system for managing clustered and non-clustered storage systems
Granted: September 18, 2012
Patent Number:
8271556
Method and system for managing a storage environment having a cluster based storage system and a non-cluster based storage system is provided. A management application collects information regarding components of both the cluster based storage system and the non-cluster based storage system. A layout having a plurality of data structures is generated and maintained by the management application. The data structures include information regarding the components and their relationships with…
Load-derived probability-based domain name service in a network storage cluster
Granted: September 18, 2012
Patent Number:
8271652
DNS name resolution is integrated into each node in a network storage cluster, to allow load balancing of network addresses, using a weighted random distribution to resolve DNS requests. A node in the cluster gathers statistics on utilization of resources, such as CPU utilization and throughput, on nodes in the cluster and distributes those statistics to all other nodes. Each node uses the same algorithm to generate weights for the various IP addresses of the cluster, based on the…
Mechanism for performing fast directory lookup in a server system
Granted: September 11, 2012
Patent Number:
8266136
Embodiments of the present invention provide a novel technique for maintaining directory-based quota, for performing directory notification to a client system, and performing other such operations by efficiently finding ancestral directory associations on a server system without performing multiple accesses to data structures associated with the directory associations. Since data structures do not need to be accessed multiple times, performance of the server system can be improved.
System and method for flexible space reservations in a file system supporting persistent consistency point image
Granted: September 11, 2012
Patent Number:
8266191
The present invention provides a system and method for flexible space reservations in a file system. An administrator of a storage system selects a fractional reserve percentage, which defines the size of the overwrite reserve that is to be maintained to ensure file writeability.
Method and system for automatically migrating encryption keys between key managers in a network storage system
Granted: September 11, 2012
Patent Number:
8266433
Embodiments of the present invention provide a method and system, in a network storage system, for a remote key manager performing cryptographic operations upon a failure of a protected key manager, using a hardware encryption key (key) automatically migrated from the protected key manager. During initialization, the protected and remote key managers authenticate the communication channel (e.g. trustee link) between each other. A new key generated by dedicated hardware of the protected…
System, method, and computer program product for allowing access to backup data
Granted: September 4, 2012
Patent Number:
8260747
A system, method, and computer program product are provided for allowing access to backup data resulting from performance of one or more recovery point backup operations and one or more full backup operations. This is accomplished by associating recovery point backup operations with full backup operations and allowing access to backup data resulting from performance of the recovery point backup operations and the full backup operations. In this way, logs corresponding to the backup…
System and method for implementing a flexible storage manager with threshold control
Granted: September 4, 2012
Patent Number:
8260831
A system and method for implementing storage management with threshold control is provided. A flexible storage manager associates storage devices having a similar performance characteristic into logical constructs called storage groups. Storage groups having the same performance characteristic from a plurality of storage systems are organized into storage pools. The flexible storage manager automatically provisions storage on a storage pool basis. Should a low threshold utilization be…
Method and system for balancing reconstruction load in a storage array using a scalable parity declustered layout
Granted: September 4, 2012
Patent Number:
8261016
Embodiments of the present invention provide a method and system, in a network storage system, for producing a balanced reconstruction load across storage devices (disks) in a storage array (array) using a scalable declustered layout. A scalable declustered layout is a logical configuration of parity groups across storage units (disk segments) which spread the chunk load and total share load of parity groups across disks in the array. Creation of a scalable declustered layout is achieved…
Global write-log device for managing write logs of nodes of a cluster storage system
Granted: September 4, 2012
Patent Number:
8261125
A cluster system comprises a plurality of nodes that provides data-access service to a shared storage, each node having at least one failover partner node for taking over services of a node if the node fails. Each node may produce write logs for the shared storage and periodically send write logs at predetermined time intervals to a global device which stores write logs from each node. The global device may detect failure of a node by monitoring time intervals of when write logs are…
System and method for dynamic allocation of virtual machines in a virtual server environment
Granted: September 4, 2012
Patent Number:
8261268
A system and method for dynamically producing virtual machines (VMs) across a plurality of servers in the virtual server environment is provided. A single VM request queue is produced comprising VM requests for producing the plurality of VMs. A processing thread is produced and assigned for each server and retrieves VM requests from the VM request queue and produces VMs only on the assigned server according to the retrieved VM requests. Each processing thread may be configured for…
