Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Ibrix, Inc.

Tbrix, Inc.

Philip Eric Jackson

Steven Orszag

Sudhir Srinivasan

David Michael Chrin

Boris Zuckerman

Mark Ish

A file system (i) permits storage capacity to be added easily, (ii) can be expanded beyond a given unit, (iii) is easy to administer and manage, (iv) permits data sharing, and (v) is able to perform effectively with very large storage capacity and client loads. State information from a newly added unit is communicated (e.g., automatically and transparently) to central administration and management operations. Configuration and control information from such operations is communicated (e.g., automatically) back down to the newly added units, as well as existing units. In this way, a file system can span both local storage devices (like disk drives) and networked computational devices transparently to clients. Such state and configuration and control information can include globally managed segments as the building blocks of the file system, and a fixed mapping of globally unique file identifiers (e.g., Inode numbers) and/or ranges thereof, to such segments.

Distributing files across multiple, permissibly heterogeneous, storage devices

A first file server for use with a distributed-file system includes a processor configured to determine that an incoming file system communication is associated with a first portion of the distributed-file system associated with a second file server, send a first authorization request to the second file server to request authorization to directly access the first portion of the distributed-file system, analyze a first authorization response from the second file server to determine at least one storage location associated with the first portion of the distributed-file system, determine that an incoming second authorization request received from a third file server is associated with a second portion of the distributed-file system associated with the first file server, obtain data indicative of the second portion of the distributed-file system, and send a second authorization response that includes the data.

Independent data access in a segmented file system

File system coherency of a file system, particularly for system blocks, may be maintained by (i) duplicating and verifying the (system) blocks, (ii) writing (system) blocks as a sequence of atomic commands so that at any given time, there is a valid (system) block on a physical storage device, and/or (iii) defining the file system directory data structure with directory blocks, each of the directory blocks having at least one of a directory entry and a pointer, where updates to the directory data structure are performed atomically.

Checking the validity of blocks and backup duplicates of blocks during block reads

Storage allocation in a distributed segmented file system

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Princeton Junction, NJ, United States of America

Philip Eric Jackson