Nvidia Corporation

David Dejong

Siamak Nazari

Srinivasa Murthy

Tobias Flitsch

Shayan Askarian Namaghi

Roopesh Tamma

A storage processing unit (SPU), which may be resident in a server in a storage system, provides a boot volume to the server and provides storage services. The SPU may execute a process including taking three snapshots of the boot volume respectively after writing an operating system image into the boot volume, after writing component images or otherwise customizing contents of the boot volume, and after the server boots from the boot volume. For updates, stability, or recovery of the storage system, the SPU may promote any of the snapshots to be the boot volume before the server reboots.

Snapshot-based boot volume for reliable server management and immutable reboot processes in storage processing units

A cluster storage system takes snapshots that are consistent across all storage nodes. The storage system can nearly instantaneously promote a set of consistent snapshots to their respective base volumes to restore the base volumes to be the same as the snapshots. Given these two capabilities, users can restore the system to a recovery point of the user's choice, by turning off storage service I/O, promoting the snapshots constituting the recovery point, rebooting their servers, and resuming storage service I/O.

Recovery of clustered storage systems

A storage system () includes a storage processor (-) such as a storage card resident in a host server (-) and coupled to the storage device (-). The storage processor (-) may be configured to create a virtual volume (-), store content derived from an image () downloaded from a URL storage corresponding to the virtual volume (-), and present the virtual volume (-) to the host server as a boot LUN. A management infrastructure () can be used to create a library () of images () corresponding to different storage system characteristics and used to selected which URL is provided to the storage processor (-).

Automatic population of boot volumes via provided URLs

A storage system () stores metadata using an append log to provide speed and reliability. Appending entities to the end of a metadata store () and provides reliability in the event of failure because a failed append operation at worst corrupts the end of the append log, which is easily detected and corrected. A metadata store () can be split into sections (). A used section () may be identified as garbage when the stored metadata in other sections () make the all of its stored entity sets stale. A used section () can be made garbage by storing the entity sets from the section () in another section (). Sections () containing garbage thereby change to unused allow replacement and removal of previous sections () of metadata.

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

David Dejong