International Business Machines Corporation

Carol Santich Michod

Vernon John Legvold

Chan Y Ng

Brent Cameron Beardsley

Susan Kay Candelaria

Joseph S Hyde, Ii

Michael Howard Hartung

John Richard Paveza

Lawrence Carter Blount

John Norbert McCauley

Gary Eugene Morain

Mark Albert Reid

Lloyd R Shipman, Jr

Joel H Cord

Jeffrey R Steffan

William G Sherman, Ii

Steven Richard Van Gundy

Julia Liu

Kenneth Wayne Lane

Dennis Albert Kukula

Guy Eugene Martin

William Lee Richardson

A volume-to-volume copy method on a DASD storage subsystem concurrent with host CPU application execution and referencing of data on a primary. In this method, updates to data made on a primary volume after the element was copied during a first pass will be deferred and copied only during a second pass rather than interrupting the first pass. This accumulation and deferral of updates to a second pass shortens the volume copy time and reduces application referencing delay.

Method and means for making a dual volume level copy in a DASD storage

A data processing system executes a plurality of processes in parallel. The processes access shared user records stored in memory serially. One or more data structures are used to track access by processes to the data structures and to the user records. Responsive to a fault occurring in a first parallel process, a signal is given the remaining parallel processes indicating the failure. Responsive to the failure, it is determined if the faulting parallel process had access to one of the data structures. Depending upon the circumstances of access, integrity of the user records may be assumed and the record validated. The data structures themselves can be examined to determine if the contents of memory is reliable. Typically the data structures support use of the memory as a cache.

Method of validating memory structures in data processing systems

A system and method for changing the number of logical volumes in a drawer in a rack in a direct access storage device subsystem is disclosed. The method and system are able to change the number of logical volumes without disrupting access to the other logical volumes in the rack. Channel connection addresses, which are logical volume addresses as known by the CPUs, are freed by removing the old drawer and then are mused. If the new drawer has more logical volumes than the old drawer, the next unused channel connection addresses are used with the new drawer. In a subsystem having a storage controller for providing control for a plurality of direct access storage devices, the logical volumes are spread across multiple physical devices. The storage controller maintains configuration data for the entire subsystem in redundant, non-volatile storage locations reserved specifically for its use. Each logical volume address for the rack is set by the drawer location and the logical sequence of the volumes within the drawer. As drawers are installed, the control unit sequentially assigns the volume addresses for the control unit and the channel connection addresses for the CPUs.

Method and system for maintaining concurrent data access during device

A system and method for reducing device wait time in response to a host initiated write operation modifying a data block. The system includes a host computer channel connected to a storage controller which has cache memory and a nonvolatile storage buffer in a first embodiment. An identical system makes up the second embodiment with the exception that there is no nonvolatile storage buffer in the storage controller of the second embodiment. The controller in either embodiment is coupled to a cache storage drawer containing a plurality of DASD devices for implementing a RAID parity data protection scheme, and for permanently storing data. The drawer has nonvolatile cache memory which is used for accepting data destaged from controller cache. In a first embodiment, no commit reply is sent to the controller to indicate that data has been written to DASD. Instead a status information block is created to indicate that the data has been destaged from controller cache but is not committed. The status information is stored in directory means attached to the controller. The system uses this information to create a list of data which is in the state of Not committed. In this way data can be committed according to a cache management algorithm of least recently used (LRU), rather than requiring synchronous commit which is inefficient because it requires waiting on a commit response and ties up nonvolatile storage space allocated to back-up copies of cache data. In a second embodiment, directory means attached to the controller stores information about status blocks that may be modified or unmodified. The status information is used to eliminate wait times associated with waiting for data to be written to HDAs below.

Performance enhancement system and method for a hierarchical data cache

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Tucson, AZ, United States of America

Carol Santich Michod