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Seagate Technology Incorporated

James Allen Coomes

Michael H Miller

Kenneth William Preslan

Steven R Soltis

Raymond Wesley Gilson

Edward Alan Soltis

Matthew O'Keefe

Gerald A Houlder

Thomas M Ruwart

A system includes shared Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) storage devices for processing clients coupled by a fiber channel interface. The storage devices include storage blocks, and locks controlling their use by clients. Clients issue actions to the storage devices for performing operations on the locks. A client may exclude other clients from using storage blocks using a state element to acquire the lock for shared or exclusive use. If the client modified the data, a version counter in the lock is updated when the lock is released. If an activity bit is set, the version counter is updated upon both reading and writing. Other clients can forcibly release a lock owned by a failed client by monitoring its version counter. Expiration timers associated with the locks allow acquired locks to be released by timing out. A serverless global file system (GFS) manages use of the shared storage resources, and allows remapping of the locks to the storage blocks, for example, based on activity of the locks.

Global file system and data storage device locks

An information handling system, such as a disc drive, includes a controller that communicates with other devices in a loop, and performs distributed or peer-to-peer loop error diagnostics. One example of a loop is a fiber channel arbitrated loop. Distributed or peer-to-peer loop error diagnostics identifies and diagnoses errors in the immediately upstream device and the immediately upstream link by monitoring the error count to determine of the error count is increasing or not. An increasing error count or a changed loop configuration indicates that the source of the error is not the upstream device, while an unchanging error count and an unchanged loop configuration indicates that the source of the error is the upstream link.

Peer to peer interconnect diagnostics

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White Bear Lake, MN, United States of America

James Allen Coomes