Netapp, Inc.

Mrinal K Bhattacharjee

Jagadish Vasudeva

Shivali Gupta

Ram Kesavan

Siddhartha Nandi

Priya Sehgal

Sateesh Kumar Pola

Amit Valjibhai Panara

Prateeksha Varshney

Sudhanshu Goswami

Ravikanth Dronamraju

Mohit Gupta

Kyle Diggs Sterling

Sreenath Korrakuti

Vinay Kumar B C

Travis Callahan

Saurabh Gupta

Neha Saini

Dnyaneshwar Nagorao Pawar

Arindam Banerjee

Ganga Bhavani Kondapalli

William Arthur Gutknecht

Andrew Zhu

Harendra Kumar

Supratim Deka

Boopathy Krishnamoorthy

An Zhu

Arjun Singh Kharai

Sandeep Budanur

Systems and methods for reducing the provisioned storage capacity of a disk or aggregate of disks of a storage appliance while the storage appliance continues to serve clients are provided. According to one embodiment, the size of the aggregate may be reduced by shrinking the file system of the storage appliance and removing a selected disk from the aggregate. When an identified shrink region is less than the entire addressable PVBN space of the selected disk, the file system may be shrunk by relocating valid data from the shrink region of the selected disk to one or more regions outside of the shrink region, mirroring data of the selected disk from outside of the shrink region to a smaller disk added to the aggregate, and then removing the selected disk after the mirrors are in sync, thereby reducing the provisioned storage capacity of the aggregate by the difference in size between the selected disk and the smaller disk.

Reducing provisioned storage capacity of an aggregate of a storage appliance

Systems and methods are provided for sharing ephemeral storage of a virtual machine (VM) for use as victim caches for virtual storage appliances running on the VM. According to one embodiment, a central service may run within the VM and be responsible for managing allocation and reclamation of ephemeral storage space of the VM to/from the virtual storage appliances. Responsive to startup of a new virtual storage appliance on the VM, the new virtual storage appliance may request space from the central service to inform creation of its victim cache. In connection with servicing the request, the central service may take into consideration various factors including one or more of the total aggregate size of multiple local ephemeral drives associated with the VM, remaining available ephemeral storage space, the number of active virtual storage appliances, and the SLO of the virtual storage appliance seeking to establish its victim cache.

Sharing ephemeral storage of a virtual machine for use as victim caches for use by virtual storage appliances in a cloud environment

Systems and methods for creating a virtual storage appliance on an object store to which an on-premises storage solution has tiered cold data are provided. According to one embodiment, a physical storage system deployed in an on-premises environment replicates hot data of a file system of the physical storage system stored on a set of disks associated with the physical storage system to an object storage service of a hyperscaler to which cold data of the file system has previously been tiered out by the file system. An instance of a virtual storage system may then be created within the hyperscaler that utilizes the object storage service as a primary storage tier. Finally, analytics involving a dataset, including both the data and the cold data, may be performed by accessing the dataset via the virtual storage system.

Facilitating analytics involving cold data tiered to an object store by an on-premises storage solution by creating a virtual storage appliance on the object store

Systems and methods for reducing the provisioned storage capacity of a disk or aggregate of disks of a storage appliance while the storage appliance continues to serve clients are provided. According to one embodiment, the size of the aggregate may be reduced by shrinking the file system of the storage appliance and removing a selected disk from the aggregate. When an identified shrink region includes the entire addressable PVBN space of the selected disk, the file system may be shrunk by relocating valid data from the selected disk elsewhere within the aggregate. After the valid data is relocated, the selected disk may be removed from the aggregate, thereby reducing the provisioned storage capacity of the aggregate by the size of the selected disk.

Systems and methods for performing single I/O writes are provided. According to one embodiment, responsive to receipt of a write operation from a client by a file system layer of a node of a distributed storage system and a data payload of the operation having been determined to meet a compressibility threshold, an intermediate storage layer of the node logically interposed between the file system layer and a block storage media is caused to perform a single input/output (I/O) write operation that persists the compressed data payload and corresponding metadata to support asynchronous journaling of the write operation. The single I/O write operation coupled with the use of a new pool file that maintains a list of available blocks for single I/O write operations and a modified node crash recovery approach allows the write operation to be acknowledged to the client while the journaling is performed asynchronously.

Single input/output writes in a file system hosted on a cloud, virtual, or commodity-server platform

Systems and methods for supporting dynamic disk growth within a virtual storage appliance are provided. According to one embodiment, a portion of a logical size of respective hyperscale disks provided by a hyperscaler are provisioned for use by a virtual storage system as backing for respective file system disks. To accommodate growth, block numbers for the file system disks are pre-allocated within a sparse space of a contiguous sequence of block numbers corresponding to a number of blocks represented by the logical size. Metadata is maintained for the file system disks regarding a range of the pre-allocated block numbers that are available for use. Responsive to a triggering condition, the provisioned portion of a hyperscale disk is increased and subsequently, responsive to detecting a change in a size of the hyperscale disk by the virtual storage system, a size of the corresponding file system disk is updated within the metadata.

Increasing provisioned storage capacity by means of growing underlying disks within a virtual storage appliance

A method, computing device, and non-transitory machine-readable medium for detecting malware attacks and mitigating data loss. In various embodiments, an agent is implemented in the operating system of a storage node to provide protection at the bottommost level in a data write path. The agent intercepts write requests and observes file events over time to detect anomalous behavior. For example, the agent may monitor incoming write requests and, when an incoming write request is detected, determine whether the file is associated with a malware attack risk based on an analysis of an encryption state of data in the file.

Systems and methods for protecting against malware attacks

Systems and methods are described for managing ephemeral storage of a virtual machine (VM) to provide victim caches for virtual storage appliances running on the VM. According to one embodiment, a central service may run within the VM and be responsible for managing allocation and reclamation of ephemeral storage space of the VM to/from the virtual storage appliances. Responsive to startup of a new virtual storage appliance on the VM, the new virtual storage appliance may request space from the central service to inform creation of its victim cache. In connection with servicing the request, the central service may take into consideration various factors including one or more of the total aggregate size of multiple local ephemeral drives associated with the VM, remaining available ephemeral storage space, the number of active virtual storage appliances, and the SLO of the virtual storage appliance seeking to establish its victim cache.

Managing ephemeral storage of a virtual machine to provide victim caches for use by virtual storage appliances in a cloud environment

A method, computing device, and non-transitory machine-readable medium for detecting malware attacks and mitigating data loss. In various embodiments, an agent is implemented in the operating system of a storage node to provide protection at the bottommost level in a data write path. The agent intercepts write requests and observes file events over time to detect anomalous behavior. For example, the agent may monitor incoming write requests and, when an incoming write request is detected, determine whether the file is associated with a malware attack risk based on an analysis of an encryption state of data in the file. If the file is associated with a malware attack risk, an entry for the file is added to a file log. The agent may analyze the chi-square values for data written to the files, the file log, and the file format to determine whether a malware attack is underway.

Techniques are provided for selectively storing data into allocation areas using streams. A set of allocation areas (e.g., ranges of block numbers such as virtual block numbers) are defined for a storage device. Data having particular characteristics (e.g., user data, metadata, hot data, cold data, randomly accessed data, sequentially accessed data, etc.) will be sent to the storage device for selective storage in corresponding allocation areas. For example, when a file system receives a write stream of hot data, the hot data may be assigned to a stream. The stream will be tagged using a stream identifier that is used as an indicator to the storage device to process data of the stream using an allocation area defined for hot data. In this way, data having different characteristics will be stored/confined within particular allocation areas of the storage device to reduce fragmentation and write amplification.

Selectively storing data into allocation areas using streams

A method, non-transitory computer readable medium, and device that assists with transferring data based on actual size of a data operation includes receiving a data operation from a client computing device. A type of the received data operation is determined and additional memory size associated with the determined type of the received data operation is identified. Next, a non-volatile log file is updated with the identified additional memory size and the determined type of the received data operation.

Methods for transferring data based on actual size of a data operation and devices thereof

Presented herein are methods, non-transitory computer readable media, and devices for allocating resources to a particular volume and triggering a consistency point based on the amount given to each volume, thus providing dynamic consistency point triggers. Methods for providing dynamic consistency point triggers are disclosed which include: determining a volume's capacity to utilize resources based on the volume's performance; receiving an allocation of the divided resources based on total system resources available within the storage system and the volume's performance; and triggering a consistency point upon exhausting a threshold percentage of the received/allocated resources.

Growing community of inventors

Karnataka, India

Mrinal K Bhattacharjee