Netapp, Inc.

Sandisk Technologies Inc.

Intelligent Intellectual Property Holdings 2 LLC

Prashanth Radhakrishnan

Kiran Nenmeli Srinivasan

Vikram Joshi

Yang Luan

Vaibhav Singh

Bhavesh Mehta

Michael F Brown

David Flynn

Brent Lim Tze Hao

Jerene Zhe Yang

Garth Richard Goodson

Shankar Pasupathy

Michael J Brown

Shravan Gaonkar

Scott Dawkins

An I/O manager may be configured to service I/O requests pertaining to ephemeral data of a virtual machine using a storage device that is separate from and/or independent of a primary storage resource to which the I/O request is directed. Ephemeral data may be removed from ephemeral storage in response to a removal condition and/or trigger, such as a virtual machine reboot. The I/O manager may manage transfers of ephemeral virtual machine data in response to virtual machines migrating between host computing devices. The I/O manager may be further configured to cache virtual machine data, and/or manage shared file data that is common to two or more virtual machines operating on a host computing device.

Systems and methods for storage virtualization

A de-duplication is configured to cache data for access by a plurality of different storage clients, such as virtual machines. A virtual machine may comprise a virtual machine de-duplication module configured to identify data for admission into the de-duplication cache. Data admitted into the de-duplication cache may be accessible by two or more storage clients. Metadata pertaining to the contents of the de-duplication cache may be persisted and/or transferred with respective storage clients such that the storage clients may access the contents of the de-duplication cache after rebooting, being power cycled, and/or being transferred between hosts.

Systems and methods for a de-duplication cache

A novel technique for improving throughput in a multi-core system in which data is processed according to a producer-consumer relationship by eliminating latencies caused by compulsory cache misses. The producer and consumer entities run as multiple slices of execution. Each such slice has an associated execution context that comprises of the code and data that particular slice would access. The execution contexts of the producer and consumer slices are small enough to fit in the processor caches simultaneously. When a producer entity scheduled on a first core completed production of data elements as constrained by the size of cache memories, a consumer entity is scheduled on that same core to consume the produced data elements. Meanwhile, a second slice of the producer entity is moved to another core and a second slice of a consumer entity is scheduled to consume elements produced by the second slice of the producer.

Effective scheduling of producer-consumer processes in a multi-processor system

A storage module may be configured to service I/O requests according to different persistence levels. The persistence level of an I/O request may relate to the storage resource(s) used to service the I/O request, the configuration of the storage resource(s), the storage mode of the resources, and so on. In some embodiments, a persistence level may relate to a cache mode of an I/O request. I/O requests pertaining to temporary or disposable data may be serviced using an ephemeral cache mode. An ephemeral cache mode may comprise storing I/O request data in cache storage without writing the data through (or back) to primary storage. Ephemeral cache data may be transferred between hosts in response to virtual machine migration.

Systems, methods, and interfaces for adaptive persistence

A technique is disclosed for providing high availability (HA) capability with a plurality of storage servers, which may be virtual storage servers (VSSs), in a shared-nothing storage environment. The technique uses a proxy mechanism to route requests originating at one storage server to an HA partner storage server, where the proxy is implemented inside a VSS logically below the RAID layer. The technique also involves distributing non-shared storage devices 'owned' by a storage server so that existing storage device-based heartbeat and fencing mechanisms can function unmodified for HA VSSs in shared-nothing environments. For example, a third, external host can be used to provide and export its non-shared storage to first and second storage servers, where the first and second storage servers do not own the non-shared storage on their local physical host machine.

High availability network storage system incorporating non-shared storage suitable for use with virtual storage servers

Two or more virtual machines may be co-located on a same physical machine, and the virtual machines may communicate with each other. To establish efficient communication, memory mapping information for respective virtual machines can be exchanged between the respective virtual machines. An instance of a virtualized network interface can be established, and a direct communications channel can be mapped between respective virtualized network interfaces. Data packet routing information can be updated, such that data packets transferred between two of more co-located virtual machines can be transferred using the virtualized network interface communications channel.

Virtual machine communication

A technique for 'zero copy' transitive communication of data between virtual address domains maintains a translation table hierarchy for each domain. The hierarchy of each domain includes a portion corresponding to every other domain in the system, where the portion for any particular domain begins at the same offset in the virtual address space of every domain. For each domain, there is a source hierarchy used only by the domain itself, which provides read/write access to the addresses in that domain; and a target hierarchy which provides read-only access to that domain, for use only when another domain is the target of IDC from that domain. Only one instance of the target hierarchy of each domain is provided, for all other domains as targets of IDC from that domain. For further space savings the source and target translation table hierarchies can be combined at all but the top hierarchy level.

Address translation mechanism for shared memory based inter-domain communication

A technique is disclosed for non-disruptive migration of data between storage on hosts that do not share storage with each other. Aggregate relocation is enabled to operate between the hosts in the absence of shared storage connectivity. The technique includes mirroring an aggregate from storage of a first host to storage of a second host by using a sub-RAID level proxy in each of the first and second hosts to proxy data communications between the hosts. The proxy is used in lieu of the mirroring application in the first host having direct access to the storage devices of the second host. The technique further includes relocating the aggregate from the first host to the second host.

Non-disruptive data migration between processing systems that do not share storage

Methods and system for securely capturing workloads at a live network for replaying at a test network. The disclosed system captures file system states and workloads of a live server at the live network. In one embodiment the captured data is anonymized to protect confidentiality of the data. A file system of a test server at the test network is mirrored from a captured state of the live server. An anonymized version of the captured workloads is replayed as a request to the test server. A lost or incomplete command is recreated from the states of the live server. An order of the commands during replay can be based on an order in the captured workload, or based on a causal relationship. Performance characteristics of the live network are determined based on the response to the replayed command.

Method and system for securely capturing workloads at a live network for replaying at a test network

A novel technique for improving throughput in a multi-core system (and in a virtual machine environment) in which data is processed according to a producer-consumer relationship by eliminating latencies caused by compulsory cache misses. A producer process is executed on one processor core and two or more instances of a consumer process are executed on different cores so that while the first instance of a consumer process is executed in a 'consuming' mode to process a first subset of data elements produced by the producer process, a second instance of the consumer process pre-fetches, to its cache memory, a second subset of data items produced by the producer process. As a result, the second subset of data items is already cached at the core where the second instance is running even before the consumer process starts processing the second subset of data items.

Growing community of inventors

Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Prashanth Radhakrishnan