International Business Machines Corporation

Gary Robert Lyons

Renato John Recio

Ian David Judd

Pat Allen Buckland

Jack E Reeder

Michael Francis Scully

A Solid State Disk (&ldquo;SSD&rdquo;) and accompanying logic to extend the local memory of an adapter for RAID storage devices. Use of virtual memory, representing the SSD range of addresses in the adapter address memory, allows the adapter to incorporate the total memory into the adapter memory structure. The SSD is non-volatile and large amounts of cache items may be transferred to the SSD as an extension of the adapter memory. The cache write may be delayed and subsequently written to a designated address on a RAID drive, freeing the adapter on-board memory and control functions. Further, the size of the SSD allows for large amounts of data staging and storage, permitting device-to-device communications that would reduce the read and write commands between the host, adapter and drives.

Extending adapter memory with solid state disks in JBOD and RAID environments

A new drive installation to a multiple drive, drive group begins with a start command issued by the drive group controller to a new drive. The command is then propagated to every other drive. A successful completion reply is propagated back to the first drive and then to the controller. The controller transfers managing control to the new drive and the new drive reads the first data segment it needs; i.e., in a sixth drive addition to a five drive group, this is data segment six on drive one. The segment read by the new drive (drive six) is placed in the segment stack on the first drive (segment six of Drive,is read and Drive,places segment six on its segment stack). The process is repeated with each drive in the RAID device, in order. All drives consider their segment stack to determine if they have locations to read. As a segment is read on a drive, the segment is placed into the drive's segment stack and removed from the source drive as the segment is written to the target drive. After a few operations, multiple drives are reading and writing segments to target drives in parallel. The access to the controller is minimal and the functions are taking place in parallel, thereby reducing the drive group transactions with the controller and speeding up the installation process.

Method and apparatus for reducing processor operations when adding a new drive to a raid-6 drive group

A method is provided for reducing the number of transactions for multi-segmented host system write operations in a RAID 6 device. The method comprises sending a write command for new multiple data segments to a plurality of data drives in the RAID 6 device via a RAID 6 controller. The RAID 6 device has data segments stored in stripes on the data drives and parity drives within the RAID 6 device. Parity is calculated for old data segments, new data segments and old parity on the parity drives to determine a new parity. The new parity is then written to one parity drive of the multiple parity drives within the RAID 6 device, thereby reducing the number of read and write transactions between the controller and the drives within the RAID 6 device.

Growing community of inventors

Leander, TX, United States of America

Gary Robert Lyons