Emc IP Holding Company LLC

Dell Products Inc.

Barry Naujok

Mayank Rajawat

Benjamin A Leis

Mohd Fahadullah

Chris Stacey

Jonathan Walton

Kiran Ballal

The described technology is generally directed an extension to the IFS domains architecture, referred to herein as filter domains. IFS domains allows tagging of files in a tree-like dataset. Thus, a domain can be defined at the root of the dataset such as the topmost directory under which all files reside. These domains are inherently hierarchical, path-based entities. Filter domains extends this organization to allow domains to be applied beyond hierarchical tree structures in order to also provide arbitrary grouping of file objects based on any suitable membership condition.

Extending filesystem domains with a domain membership condition

The described technology is generally directed towards domains that data services can use to collect files of a global filesystem namespace into groups, and domains that can be used to exclude certain files or metadata. A data service (a domain patron) creates a domain, e.g., for a particular directory, and a domain manager associates files under that directory with domain membership information. The data service can relate exclusion information to the domain, e.g., to exclude part of the directory. This can be done by an exclusion domain instance, e.g., a child to a parent domain, or can be done in metadata, by having the data service (e.g., a snapshot data service) exclude certain metadata such as snapshot identifiers from a larger set of snapshot identifiers.

Excluding directory trees from data service operations

The described technology is generally directed towards domains that data services can use to collect files of a global filesystem namespace into groups. A data service (a domain patron) creates a domain, e.g., for a particular directory, and a domain manager associates files under that directory with domain membership information. Thereafter, the data service can use the domain membership information associated with a file to determine whether to include that file in a data service operation. In one implementation the membership information is maintained in file metadata, facilitating fast and efficient retrieval of the information in near constant time. Exclusion from a domain, hard links, renames and alternate data streams are among the various aspects supported by the domain technology.

Partitioning a distributed filesystem namespace

Growing community of inventors

Lilydale, Australia

Barry Naujok