Netapp, Inc.

Keith Moyer

Charles D Binford

William Patrick Delaney

Joseph Moore

Joseph Russell Blount

Randolph Wesley Sterns

Wei Sun

Satish Sangapu

A method, a computing device, and a non-transitory machine-readable medium for allocating data compression activities in a storage system are provided. A method includes tracking, by a storage controller, computing resources corresponding to a storage server. The storage controller processes one or more host read requests to access data requested by one or more hosts, the processing of the one or more host read requests including decompressing the data requested by the one or more hosts from the storage server and providing the decompressed data to the one or more hosts. The storage controller determines an amount of available computing resources after processing the one or more host read requests. Based on the amount of available computing resources, the storage controller performs inline compression of a first portion of host write requests and background compression of a second portion of the host write requests.

Systems and methods for allocating data compression activities in a storage system

A system for tracking metadata changes and recovering from system interruptions. With host I/O, corresponding metadata incremental changes are aggregated and stored in a write-ahead log before being performed to their in-memory buffers. As those buffers are flushed, checkpoints are created and stored in the log. As the log wraps to the start, older entries are overwritten after they are freed from any remaining dependencies by newer checkpoints. If metadata entities have not created new checkpoints, they are instructed to in order to free up space for new aggregated batches and checkpoints. After an interruption, the wrap point is located in the log. From the wrap point, the log is scanned backwards to provide checkpoints to metadata entities. The log is then scanned forwards to perform changes specified by aggregated batches. The metadata entities' volatile memory states are recovered to what they were before the interruption.

Write-ahead log maintenance and recovery

An I/O processing stack includes a proxy that can provide processing services for access requests to initialized and uninitialized storage regions. For a write request, the proxy stores write information in a write metadata repository. If the write is requested for an address in an initialized storage region of the storage system, the proxy performs a write to the initialized region based on region information in the write I/O access request. If the write is requested for an address in an uninitialized storage region of the storage system, the proxy performs an on-demand initialization of the storage region and then performs a write to the storage region based on region information provided by the proxy.

Data access request monitoring to reduce system resource use for background operations

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Wichita, KS, United States of America

Keith Moyer