Vmware, Inc.

Austin Clements

Irfan Ahmad

Murali Vilayannur

Jinyuan Li

Decentralized deduplication operations in a computer system employ a hash index that is a variant of a B+ tree to support both efficient sequential updates as well as efficient random updates. Sequential update is selected when deduplication is infrequently performed, such as on the order of days, and random update is selected when deduplication is performed more frequently, such as on the order of seconds. More frequent deduplication may be beneficial during periods when large amounts of temporary duplicate data are created, and the system may not have enough storage space to accommodate the temporary spike in demand.

Computer storage deduplication

A data center comprising plural computer hosts and a storage system external to said hosts is disclosed. The storage system includes storage blocks for storing tangibly encoded data blocks. Each of said hosts includes a deduplicating file system for identifying and merging identical data blocks stored in respective storage blocks into one of said storage blocks so that a first file exclusively accessed by a first host of said hosts and a second file accessed exclusively by a second host of said hosts concurrently refer to the same one of said storage blocks.

Decentralized deduplication operations in a virtualized computer environment having multiple storage devices employ a hash index for each storage device. When an image of a virtual machine is selected to be migrated from a source storage device to a destination storage device, hash values representing content of the storage blocks of the virtual machine are compared with hash entries of the destination hash index. Storage blocks of the virtual machine that have matching hash entries in the destination hash index are not transferred as part of the migration process so that the overall migration process can be accelerated.

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Arlington, MA, United States of America

Austin Clements