Vmware, Inc.

Netapp, Inc.

Delphix Corporation

Network Appliance, Inc.

Matthew Benjamin Amdur

Ashish Prakash

Kartik Ayyar

Emmanuel Ackaouy

David A Grunwald

Brian Mederic Quirion

Christos Karamanolis

Eric Noah Schrock

Robert M English

Daniel J Scales

Michael Nelson

Jason Ansel Lango

Hao Xu

Paul Christopher Eastham

Robert Lieh-Yuan Tsai

Qinghua Zheng

Patrick William Penzias Dirks

Peter Griess

Peng Dai

J Chris Wagner

Wenguang Wang

Matthew Allan Ahrens

Hubert Ken Sun

Chris Patton

Zubair Khan

Ling Zheng

Eric Shannon Knauft

Enning Xiang

Ram Kesavan

Maxime Austruy

Jyothir Ramanan

J Christopher Wagner

Radu Berinde

Long Yang

Christopher J Wagner

Robert Leih-Yuan Tsai

Paul Christoper Eastham

Techniques for decoupling compute and storage resources in a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) are provided. In one set of embodiments, a control plane of the HCI deployment can provision a host from a host platform of an infrastructure on which the HCI deployment is implemented and can provision one or more storage volumes from a storage platform of the infrastructure, where the storage platform runs on physical server resources in the infrastructure that are separate from the host platform. The control plane can then cause the one or more storage volumes to be network-attached to the host in a manner that enables a hypervisor of the host to make the one or more storage volumes available, as part of a virtual storage pool, to one or more virtual machines in the HCI deployment for data storage.

Decoupling compute and storage resources in cloud-based HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure)

An example method of providing a common volume (cVol) datastore for virtual machines (VMs) managed by a hypervisor in a virtualized computing system is described. The method includes: mounting, by the hypervisor, a network file system share of a common volume (cVol), the cVol stored in shared storage of the virtualized computing system, the network file system share storing metadata for the VMs; creating a file system for the cVol datastore backed by the network file system share; routing file operations targeting the metadata to the file system for the cVol datastore; and routing file operations targeting virtual disks of the VMs to an object storage pool of the cVol based on descriptors in the metadata that point to objects backing the virtual disks.

Common volume representation in a virtualized computing system

The disclosure herein describes storing data using a capacity data storage tier and a smaller performance data storage tier. The capacity data storage tier includes capacity data storage hardware configured to store log-structured leaf pages (LLPs), and the performance data storage tier includes performance data storage hardware. A virtual address table (VAT) includes a set of virtual address entries referencing the LLPs. A tree-structured index includes index nodes referencing the set of virtual address entries of the VAT. Data to be stored is received, and at least a first portion of metadata associated with the received data is stored in the LLPs using the VAT, and at least a second portion of metadata associated with the received data is stored in the performance data storage tier. The architecture reduces space usage of the performance data storage tier.

Storing data in a log-structured format in a two-tier storage system

Techniques for implementing dynamic base disk mirroring for linked clones are provided. In one set of embodiments, a first node in a distributed storage system can monitor a congestion level of a base disk residing on the first node, where the base disk is shared by a plurality of linked clones. Upon determining that the congestion level exceeds a threshold, the first node can send, to a second node, a request to create a mirror of the base disk on that second node. Upon receiving an acknowledgement from the second node that the mirror has been successfully created, the first node can update a mirror set associated with the base disk to include an entry identifying the mirror. The first node can then communicate the updated mirror set to one or more other nodes.

Dynamic base disk mirroring for linked clones

An application development system allows developers of software system to manage infrastructure resources during the development and testing process. The application development system allows users to define application containers that comprise components including source code, binaries, and virtual databases used for the application. An application container can be associated with policies that control various aspects of the actions taken using the application container including constraints and access control. The application development system enforces the policies for actions taken by users for the application containers. The encapsulation of policies with the application containers allows users of the application containers to take actions including creating virtual databases, provisioning virtual databases, and the like without requiring system administrators to manage resource issues.

Version control of applications

Database storage systems provide replication capability that allows data of a source database storage system to be replicated to a target database storage system. Virtual databases can be provisioned from the target database system, thereby supporting remote provisioning of virtual databases. The virtual databases on the remote site can be used to perform various operations including read/write of data, refresh, rollback, and so on. Database objects may be deleted on the source database storage system while the corresponding data is used by other entities for example, virtual databases at the target database storage system. The database storage system verifies if an entity being deleted is in use by any other database infrastructure object of the database storage system. A placeholder object maintains the data corresponding to the deleted object. This provides the ability to create geographical distribution networks and support remote provisioning of virtual databases.

Remote provisioning of virtual databases

A database storage system creates secure snapshots or virtual databases based on a source database that stores sensitive information. The database storage system applies a masking function to the sensitive data and stores the masked data in the secure snapshot. The database storage system creates secure snapshots that share masked database blocks with other secure snapshots. The database storage system shares masked database blocks by storing information identifying a previously created masked database block for a new secure snapshot. If a masked database block for the new secure snapshot is different from the previously created masked database block, the database storage system stores metadata including the difference between the two masked database blocks. The database storage system allows sharing any transformed database blocks across snapshot, if the transformed database blocks are obtained by applying a transformation function to data of the source database.

Creating secure virtual databases storing masked data

An application development system allows developers of a software system to manage infrastructure resources during the development and testing process. The application development system allows users to define application containers that comprise components including source code, binaries, and virtual databases used for the application. An application container can be associated with policies that control various aspects of the actions taken using the application container including constraints and access control. The application development system enforces the policies for actions taken by users for the application containers. The encapsulation of policies with the application containers allows users of the application containers to take actions including creating virtual databases, provisioning virtual databases, and the like without requiring system administrators to manage resource issues.

A source storage system replicates snapshots stored on the source storage system to a target storage system. The source storage system stores a plurality of snapshots. The source storage system also stores parent child relationships between snapshots. The source storage system allows child snapshots of a parent snapshot to be modified independent of each other. The source storage system determines changed blocks of a snapshot compared to a previously transmitted snapshot and sends only the changed blocks to the target storage system. The source storage system determines the changed blocks of a snapshot compared to a previously replicated snapshot based on time of creation of a common ancestor of two snapshots. The source storage system transmits a data block of a snapshot if either the data block or a corresponding data block of the previously replicated snapshot was modified after the creation of the common ancestor snapshot.

Replicating snapshots from a source storage system to a target storage system

A network caching system has a multi-protocol caching filer coupled to an origin server to provide storage virtualization of data served by the filer in response to data access requests issued by multi-protocol clients over a computer network. The multi-protocol caching filer includes a file system configured to manage a sparse volume that 'virtualizes' a storage space of the data to thereby provide a cache function that enables access to data by the multi-protocol clients. To that end, the caching filer further includes a multi-protocol engine configured to translate the multi-protocol client data access requests into generic file system primitive operations executable by both the caching filer and the origin server.

System and method for caching network file systems

A virtualization technique, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, includes emulating the small computing system interface (SCSI) protocol to access a virtual SCSI storage device backed by a file stored on network attached storage (NAS).

SCSI protocol emulation for virtual storage device stored on NAS device

The replication of a group of data sets is coordinated into a single schedule based on the recovery point objective (RPO) of each data set. The resulting generated schedule satisfies each data set's RPO requirements and minimizes bandwidth use. If necessary bandwidth exceeds available bandwidth, the resulting generated schedule attempts to best satisfy each data set's RPO requirements given the available bandwidth.

System and method for scheduling data storage replication over a network

Snapshots that are consistent across a group of data objects are generated. The snapshots are initiated by a coordinator, which transmits a sequence of commands to each storage node hosting a data object within a group of data objects. The first command prepares a data object for a snapshot. After a data object has been successfully prepared, an acknowledgment is sent to the coordinator. Once all appropriate acknowledgments are received, the coordinator sends a command to confirm that a snapshot has been created for each data object in the respective group. After receiving this confirmation, the coordinator takes action to confirm or record the successful completion of the group-consistent snapshot.

Method and system for generating consistent snapshots for a group of data objects

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Matthew Benjamin Amdur