Comm Vault Systems, Inc.

Manoj Kumar Pradhan

Dmitriy Borisovich Zakharkin

Sanath Kumar

Arun Prabu Duraisamy

Parag Gokhale

Sri Karthik Bhagi

Prosenjit Sinha

Rahul S Pawar

Manas Bhikchand Mutha

Vipul Pawale

Pushpendra Singh

Pavan Kumar Reddy Bedadala

Hemant Mishra

Gopikannan Venugopalsamy

Jaya Rama Raju Inavolu

Hetalkumar N Joshi

Divakar Radhakrishnan

Rohit Sivadas

Jayasree Yakkala

Sunil Babu Telagamsetti

Douglas Cary Swallow

Paramasivam Kumarasamy

Manoj Kumar Vijayan

Bhavyan Bharatkumar Mehta

Certain embodiments disclosed herein reduce or eliminate a communication bottleneck at the storage manager by reducing communication with the storage manager while maintaining functionality of an information management system. In some implementations, a client obtains information for enabling a secondary storage job (e.g., a backup or restore) from a storage manager and stores the information (which may be referred to as job metadata) in a local cache. The client may then reuse the job metadata for multiple storage jobs reducing the frequency of communication with the storage manager. When a configuration of the information management system changes, or the availability of resources changes, the storage manager can push updates to the job metadata to the clients. Further, a client can periodically request updated job metadata from the storage manager ensuring that the client does not rely on out-of-date job metadata.

Network storage backup using distributed media agents

An improved content indexing (CI) system is disclosed herein. For example, the improved CI system may include a distributed architecture of client computing devices, media agents, a single backup and CI database, and a pool of servers. After a file backup occurs, the backup and CI database may include file metadata indices and other information associated with backed up files. Servers in the pool of servers may, in parallel, query the backup and CI database for a list of files assigned to the respective server that have not been content indexed. The servers may then request a media agent to restore the assigned files from secondary storage and provide the restored files to the servers. The servers may then content index the received restored files. Once the content indexing is complete, the servers can send the content index information to the backup and CI database for storage.

Distributed framework for data proximity-based task splitting in a content indexing system

An information management system implements a method for determining whether to initiate a failover of a storage manager in the system. Nodes in the system may be assigned as monitoring nodes configured to communicate with a storage manager. Furthermore, each monitoring node may be configured to transmit a status inquiry message to each other monitoring node, and each monitoring node may receive a status inquiry message from each other monitoring node. Each monitoring node may also generate a session message comprising status information, and a plurality of failover nodes may receive the generated session messages. A failover node may then determine whether a failover condition has occurred by applying a plurality of failover rules to the status information of the transmitted session message. Where the failover node determines that a failover condition has occurred, the failover node may activate another storage manager to take place of the presently assigned storage manager.

Automatic failover of a storage manager

Embodiments disclosed herein address the need to more efficiently backup a network-based storage environment that may be remote from a primary storage environment. For example, embodiments herein can provide a more efficient backup of a storage managed by a third-party entity. To improve the backup process, embodiments herein may optimize the number of scanning threads that are used to identify files that are to be backed up by, for example, analyzing the characteristics of the network and/or the network storage system to determine a number of scanning threads that will enable faster scanning of the network storage system while at the same time not overburden or be slowed down by a network between the network-based storage environment and the primary storage environment.

Multi-threaded scanning of distributed file systems

Historical network data-based scanning thread generation

An information management system implements a method for determining whether to initiate a failover of a storage manager in the system. Nodes in the system may be assigned as monitoring nodes configured to communicate with a storage manager. Furthermore, each monitoring node may be configured to transmit a status inquiry message to each other monitoring node, and each monitoring node may receive a status inquiry message from each other monitoring node. Each monitoring node may also generate a session message comprising status information, and a plurality of failover nodes may receive the generated session messages. A failover node may then determine whether a failover condition has occurred by applying a plurality of failover rules to the status information of the transmitted session message. Where the failover node determines that a failover condition has occurred, the failover node may activate an offline storage manager to replace the active storage manager.

An improved content indexing system is disclosed herein that content indexing system combines the functionality of the backup metadata database and the content index database into a single backup and content index database to avoid the need to perform synchronization operations. By using a single backup and content index database, the content indexing system also reduces the computing performance costs that would be associated with the synchronization operations as the amount of indexed content increases, thereby solving scalability issues.

Distributed architecture for tracking content indexing

Distributed framework for task splitting and task assignments in a content indexing system

Multi-tiered backup indexing

In certain systems disclosed herein, a distributed data monitoring and management system is provided that can replicate a distributed storage environment. The distributed data monitoring and management system can intelligently and automatically configure data access nodes to form a structure that matches the distributed storage environment. By matching the structure of the distributed storage environment, the distributed structure of the data may be maintained, enabling the data to be backed up from and/or restored to the distributed storage environment and/or migrated to another distributed storage environment without altering the distribution of the data. Further, embodiments herein enable the monitoring of nodes within the system and transfer of data from a non-distributed environment to a distributed storage environment. Thus, in some cases, an entity can migrate data from a local storage structure to a network-based distributed storage structure.

Monitoring of nodes within a distributed storage environment

Certain embodiments disclosed herein reduce or eliminate a communication bottleneck at the storage manager by reducing communication with the storage manager while maintaining functionality of an information management system. In some implementations, operations performed as part of a backup process may be stored in transaction logs. These transaction logs may include information about a transaction performed between the client computing system and the network storage that hosts the backup of the client computing system. The transaction logs may be provided to a secondary storage system that can be used to form a backup index. The backup index may be used to facilitate accessing the data stored at the network storage. Advantageously, generating the transaction logs and separating the generation of the backup index from the backup process can reduce resource usage during performance of the backup and speed up the backup process while further reducing interaction with the storage manager.

Transaction log index generation in an enterprise backup system

Growing community of inventors

Edison, NJ, United States of America

Manoj Kumar Pradhan