International Business Machines Corporation

Oren Wolf

Gregory John Tevis

Eran Raichstein

David Gregory Van Hise

Ofer Elrom

James Patrick Smith

Uri Wolloch

Ofer Peretz

Techniques for adjusting the frequency of data backups and initiating event-driven backups in a storage system are disclosed herein. In one embodiment, a self-adjusting backup frequency, known as a 'Change Rate Objective,' is defined to conduct or delay backups for one or more volumes in the storage system on the basis of an associated policy value. The Change Rate Objective may be tied to one or more business or data activity events, such as the amount and type of data changes since a last backup. The storage system may also be tailored to conduct or delay full or incremental backups on the basis of a Change Rate Objective that measures whether a full or incremental or differential backup is more appropriate. Various data or system failures, or data or business events may also be used to adjust the retention periods of continuous data protection (CDP) data and delay a rollup of CDP data.

Automated and self-adjusting data protection driven by business and data activity events

Provided are a computer program product, system, and method for restoring objects in a client-server environment. An entry is added to an index for each chunk identifier. Each index entry includes one of the chunk identifiers and a reference to the chunk of data in the target storage from which the chunk identifier was calculated. A request is transmitted to a server recovery agent to recover an object from the storage server. Chunk identifiers of chunks of data in the requested object to recover are received from the server recovery agent. A determination is made from the index of whether the received chunk identifiers for the requested object matches the chunk identifiers indicated in the index. A request is made of the chunks from the server recovery agent for the received chunk identifiers not matching chunk identifiers in the index entries.

Restoring objects in a client-server environment

A first computational platform generates a data structure that indicates a set of blocks, wherein the indicated set of blocks have to be rewritten to revert a logical storage structure stored in the first computational platform to a previous state. An Input/Output (I/O) request that corresponds to a read operation on a selected block of the logical storage structure is received. A determination is made from the data structure that the selected block has to be rewritten to revert the logical storage structure stored in the first computational platform to the previous state. The first computational platform receives the selected block from a second computational platform, in response to a request made by the first computational platform to the second computational platform for the selected block.

Incremental and prioritized restoration of blocks

Providing shared access to data storage resources in a cluster computing environment, including detecting when a computer node requests access to a data storage device in a manner that excludes a computing device from accessing the data storage device, where the computer node is configured to communicate with the data storage device along a first communications channel, and where the computing device is configured to communicate with the data storage device along a second communications channel that is exclusive of the first communications channel, and responsive to the detecting, causing the data storage device to allow the computer node and the computing device to share access to the data storage device.

Providing shared access to data storage resources across cluster computing environment boundaries

Described is a method, system, and computer program product for selecting a data repository within a computing environment. The data repository can exist on multiple target computing systems as a logical entity called a volume or a file system. When selecting at least one data repository, a data protection system of the computing environment analyzes the incoming data from a source computing system, in conjunction with information describing the data repositories. The data repository information, or repository characteristic information, can be stored on a repository volume table (RVT) of the data protection system. By determining a weighted selection score from the analysis of all the information available to the data protection system, the data protection system can intelligently select a data repository for storing data from the source computing system. Further, by tracking repository characteristic information on a continuous or periodic basis, the data protection system can enable emulated views of data that has been stored on the data repositories of the computing environment.

Data repository selection within a storage environment

Embodiments for data tagging in a computing environment are provided. A write operation in an operating system (OS) file system level storage layer is intercepted. A set of signatures in a sub-chunk level is calculated. The set of signatures are aligned to the beginning of an OS file system-level object and stored in a memory location, such as a cache, along with file system information relating to the write operation and to the file system-level object that the data is written into. Following file system processing, and as the data is written into storage in blocks, the write operation is intercepted in the block level storage layer. A secondary set of signatures in a sub-block level is calculated using a common algorithm used to create the original set of signatures. The sets of signatures are compared against each other, and blocks of the data having matching signatures are tagged with the file system information stored in the memory location.

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Bedford, MA, United States of America

Oren Wolf