Netapp, Inc.

Network Appliance, Inc.

James Andrew Ignatuk

Jeffrey Eric Semke

Daniel S Nydick

Andrew G Reynolds

Tom Hicks

Jeffrey David Prem

Brian Richard Panasko

Anton William Knaus

Daniel Clash

David Phillip Kutz

Andrew Ryan Dalton

Systems and methods are disclosed for monitoring and recovering from internal and external network connectivity losses. The systems and applications implement algorithms that mark sets of network ports as healthy or degraded, and this way the filer can recover from and compensate for sets that are not reachable, based on the diagnostics performed on the internal and external reachability of the set and/or individual network ports as disclosed herein.

Recovering from and avoiding network connectivity loss

Methods and systems for port reachability are provided. The process obtains an identifier for ports of a broadcast domain to access storage space at a clustered storage system; sends a discovery request to the ports of the broadcast domain; receives a response to the discovery request from some or all the ports; places ports that responded to the discovery request to a first group that indicates that all ports within the group are reachable; and reports ports within the first group to a user to indicate which ports within the broadcast domain are reachable.

Methods and systems for managing port reachability in a clustered system

A system and method for offloading network processes from main processors of a storage system and performing them on parallel processing modules. Embodiments of the present invention allocate resources such as memory and/or buffers to particular connections between various storage operating system processes or between storage operating system processes and a network interface. Connections are identified by a connection identifier (CID) and are assigned particular buffers according to parameters such as buffer availability, connection priority, and/or maximum allocation thresholds. A connection associated with a CID is guaranteed access to a certain number of dedicated buffers. Deadlock is avoided even when an operating system process associated with a different CID attempts to exhaust available memory and/or buffers because such processes will only have access to their own allocated resources.

Method and apparatus for allocating network protocol operation resources

A virtual user interface allows a collection or cluster of data storage devices (nodes of the cluster) to be managed remotely by providing access to cluster management software running on one or more nodes of the cluster. Moreover, the virtual user interface fails-over, such that, if a node hosting an instance of the virtual user interface is unable to continue hosting (e.g., communication becomes unreliable, hardware failure, etc.), the hosting duties are substantially automatically migrated to another node in the cluster. Further, failover rules are substantially automatically organized at an initiation of the cluster, and adjusted in accordance with ongoing events occurring in the cluster to provide an administrator with substantially seamless cluster management capabilities.

Virtual user interface failover

Virtual interfaces on a cluster of servers in a mass data storage system are automatically reconfigured by transferring an internet protocol (IP) address hosting responsibility from one operative port to another operative port within the cluster, in response to a change in operative status of any port within the cluster.

Growing community of inventors

Mars, PA, United States of America

James Andrew Ignatuk