Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Gaurav Omprakash Deshpande

Guhan Suriyanarayanan

Daniel J Thompson

Ali Ediz Turkoglu

Mallikarjun Chadalapaka

Anuj Bindal

Bodhi Deb

Described is a technology by which a distributed system of computer nodes that provides services is self-updated via a component of the distributed system. Such a self-updating run applies one or more updates to each of the member computer nodes in the distributed system while maintaining the services provided by the distributed system. The updating run may include moving workloads from each computer node to be updated, updating that node, and reinstating workloads after updating. Performing the updating run may include moving update-related responsibility, which may be a workload, from one computer node to another computer node.

Self-updating functionality in a distributed system

A block based backup system may store backed up data from multiple clients by maintaining backup databases for each client, where each backup database may include blocks of data. The backup system may perform a de-duplication process by examining the databases to identify common blocks and moving the common blocks to a common database. The common blocks may be removed from the client backup databases and a pointer substituted for the data, thus compacting the client backup databases. The de-duplication operation may be performed at an opportunistic time, such as after the clients have completed any data transfer to the backup system.

Opportunistic asynchronous de-duplication in block level backups

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Gaurav Omprakash Deshpande