Lsi Corporation

Gregory L Huff

Timothy E Hoglund

Brad D Besmer

Mark J Jander

Daniel R Zaharris

Jason McGinley

Daniel S Fisher

Edward F Marchand

The present invention provides an HDD performance enhancement system that utilizes excess disk capacity as cache memory to enhance the I/O performance of the drive. The cache memory is distributed throughout the disk, for example in alternating tracks, sectors dedicated to serving as cache, or other distributed cache track segments or segment groups. Distributing the cache throughout the disk reduces the physical distance of the I/O head to the closest available cache location. The system minimizes the write seek time by storing write data in the closest available cache location. High utilization data blocks are stored in multiple cache location locations to reduce read seek time for high utilization data. The cached data is eventually written to permanent memory and cleared from the cache during idle or low data storage utilization periods.

High density disk drive performance enhancement system

The present invention is directed to a boot appliance for a data storage system. The boot appliance is a self-contained, pre-configured device that serves as a boot device for multiple servers. The boot appliance contains multiple hard drives which are configured into one or more RAID volumes. Each volume is divided into multiple partitions, with each partition serving as the boot drive for any server connected to it. The boot appliance provides its own environmental controls and Ethernet connection which may be used for providing alerts regarding the health of the components of the boot appliance and/or data storage system to a monitoring system, such as a network management system. The boot appliance may provide a boot drive and operating system image to multiple servers at the same time.

Storage system with boot appliance for improving reliability/availability/serviceability in high density server environments

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The Woodlands, TX, United States of America

Gregory L Huff