Netapp, Inc.

Houze Xu

Yuepeng Qi

Rajesh Rajaraman

William D Dallas

Sangramsinh Pandurang Pawar

Per Olov Wahlstrom

Yanbei Wang

Joseph Brown

John David McA'Nulty

Ruitao Duan

Systems and methods for flushing an operation log journal to both ephemeral storage and persistent storage during a shutdown sequence of a virtual storage system to minimize data-loss scenarios are provided. According to one embodiment, the shutdown or reboot scenarios that result in loss of data are minimized by using persistent storage as a backup to ephemeral storage when the scenario results in rehosting of virtual storage system. For example, responsive to an event indicative of an imminent shutdown or reboot of the virtual storage system, vNVRAM memory may be flushed to both ephemeral storage and persistent storage (e.g., a boot disk). In this manner, when the virtual storage system is rehosted after an unplanned shutdown or reboot resulting from an unrecoverable host error (other than an unrecoverable hardware failure), the operation log journal may be recovered from persistent storage to facilitate vNVRAM replay and avoid data loss.

Reducing potential data-loss scenarios when using ephemeral storage as backing storage for journaling by a virtual storage system

Systems and methods for making use of non-persistent storage as the journaling storage media for a virtual storage system are provided. According to one embodiment, in order to meet the needs of Extreme Low Latency Workloads while also seeking to provide predictable performance and the lowest possible latency, ephemeral storage of the virtual storage system is used to preserve state information (e.g., in the form of boot arguments and an operation log journal) across a host failure recovery scenario in which the virtual storage system is expected to be redeployed within a compute instance brought up by a cloud environment of a hyperscaler on the same host, thereby providing improved data durability (fewer host failure scenarios that result in lost data) as compared to the use of ephemeral memory of the compute instance and lower write latency than the use of persistent storage provided by the cloud environment.

Using ephemeral storage as backing storage for journaling by a virtual storage system

Methods and systems for a networked storage environment are provided. One method includes splitting, by a first node, a payload into a plurality of data packets, each data packet having a portion of the payload indicated by an offset value indicating a position of each portion within the payload; transmitting, by the first node, the plurality of data packets to a second node using a network connection for a transaction, each data packet including a header generated by the first node having the offset value and a payload size; receiving, by the first node, a message from the second node indicating an offset value of a missing payload of a missing data packet from among the plurality of data packets; and resending, by the first node, the missing data packet and any other data packet whose offset value occurs after the offset value of the missing payload.

Methods and systems for resending missing network data packets

According to one embodiment, a computer implemented method comprises providing multiple channels between a first storage node and a second storage node with each channel having a separate network connection for packets of a transport layer session, assigning packets from each channel to a group of receive queues of the second storage node, continuously monitoring whether two or more channels of the multiple channels share a same receive queue of the second storage node, and sending a communication via a channel to the first storage node to indicate a dynamic change in a hash input field (e.g., a source port, a destination port, a source internet protocol (IP) address, and a destination IP address) when two or more channels of the multiple channels share a same receive queue of the second storage node.

Cross-site high-availability distributed cloud storage system to monitor virtual channels between storage nodes and prevent channel sharing of a receive queue

Data traffic management in a computing environment utilizing direct memory access functionality is disclosed. A management agent is configured to operate within a storage node. The management agent includes a storage interface to communicate with a first set of storage devices, a management memory interface to communicate with a first management memory, and an interconnect (IC) interface to communicate with a remote peer node. The management agent controls data traffic between the storage node and the peer node to provide at least mirroring of the first management memory to the peer node and mirroring of a second management memory on the peer node to the storage node. The management agent further controls the data traffic using a traffic control approach selected based on at least a performance evaluation of an IC fabric accessible via the IC interface.

Growing community of inventors

Lexington, MA, United States of America

Houze Xu