Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Panasonic Corporation

Rajeev Y Nagar

William Jefferson Westerinen

Cenk Ergan

Michael Richard Fortin

Michael James Zwilling

Ravinder S Thind

Mark Joseph Zbikowski

Hanumantha Rao Kodavalla

Nathan Steven Obr

John M Parchem

Clark David Nicholson

Patrick L Stemen

Therron Powell

Dean L DeWhitt

Surenda Verma

Yoshiho Gotoh

Sarosh Cyrus Havewala

Dan Teodosiu

Vishal Vikram Ghotge

Garret Buban

Emily Nicole Hill

Neal Robert Christiansen

Karan Mehra

Dustin Lyle Green

Andrea D'Amato

Darren Glen Moss

Shiv Kumar Rajpal

Scott Field

Surendra Verma

Ran Kalach

Rajsekhar Das

David Benson Cross

Emily Nicole Wilson

Alan M Warwick

James Robert Benton

Gor Nishanov

Vyacheslav Kuznetsov

Jianrong Gu

Benjamin A Leis

Malcolm James Smith

Duncan G Bryce

Gregorio Maeso

Daniel Teodosiu

Scott A Field

Dean L Dewhitt

In order to provide a more efficient persistent storage device, one or more long-term storage media are included along with a non-volatile memory. In one embodiment, one portion of the non-volatile memory is used as a write buffer and a read cache for writes and reads to the long-term storage media. Interfaces are provided for controlling the use of the non-volatile memory as a write buffer and a read cache. Additionally, a portion of the non-volatile memory is used to provide a direct mapping for specified sectors of the long-term storage media. Descriptive data regarding the persistent storage device is stored in another portion of the non-volatile memory.

Non-volatile memory cache performance improvement

Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to an offload provider. In aspects, an offload provider may provide a token that represents data. The offload provider may be expected to ensure that the data the token represents will not change while the token is valid. The offload provider may take actions to ensure the immutability of the data. The actions may be taken, for example, in conjunction with receiving an offload read and/or offload write, and/or in conjunction with receiving another write that, if allowed to proceed, would otherwise change the data represented by the token.

Offload read and write offload provider

The storage of data sets in a storage set (e.g., data sets written to hard disk drives comprising a RAID array) may diminish the performance of the storage set through non-sequential writes, particularly if the storage devices promptly write data sets that are followed by sequentially following data sets. Additionally, storage sets may exhibit inconsistencies due to non-atomic writes of data sets and verifiers (e.g., checksums) and an intervening failure, such as an occurrence of the RAID write hole. Instead, data sets and verifiers may first be written to a stored on the nonvolatile media of a storage device before being committed to the storage set. Such writes may be sequentially written to the journal, irrespective of the locations of the data sets in the storage set; and recovery of a failure may simply involve re-committing the consistent records in the journal to correct incomplete writes to the storage set.

Nonvolatile media journaling of verified data sets

Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to virtualization and offload reads and writes. In aspects, an offload read allows a requestor to obtain a token that represents data while an offload write allows the requestor to request that the data (or a part thereof) represented by a token be logically written. Offload reads and writes may be used to perform various actions for virtual environments.

Virtualization and offload reads and writes

The representation of storage devices on computers (e.g., as logical volumes) may be complicated by the pooling of multiple storage devices in order to apply redundancy plans such as mirroring and checksumming. Presented herein is a storage device driver configured to operate as a storage device interface generating representations of the storage regions of the storage devices; to claim those regions as a storage controller; and to expose pooled storage regions as logical disks. Additionally, the storage device driver may support the inclusion of storage devices in a cluster, comprising nodes that may be appointed as managers of the storage pool configuration; as managers of the storage devices; as owners having exclusive read/write access to the storage pool or cluster resources; and as cluster resource writers having exclusive write access to a cluster resource. The nodes of the cluster may interoperate to share the storage devices while avoiding write conflicts.

Storage device drivers and cluster participation

A file system which is enabled to use a Metadata Partition instead of VAT for write-once discs, is provided by a pseudo-overwrite method. On applying this invention to a drive apparatus which supports pseudo-overwrite media, the file system distinguishes data to overwrite from data to append. When the data is newly written to a logical sector, the drive apparatus writes the data to a physical sector to which the logical sector corresponds. When the logical sector is overwritten the data is written to another unrecorded physical sector in the volume space, and remapping information that specifies the original address, and the remapping address are stored in the remapping table.

Pseudo-overwriting data on write-once discs

A file system is enabled to use a Metadata Partition instead of VAT for write-once discs, and is provided by a pseudo-overwrite method with a plurality of tracks especially for metadata and file data. On applying this invention to a drive apparatus that supports pseudo-overwrite media, the file system distinguishes data to overwrite from data to append (S). When the data is newly written to a logical sector, the drive apparatus writes the data to a physical sector to which the logical sector corresponds (S). When the data being overwritten is data stored in the logical sector, the data is written to the other unrecorded physical sector in the volume space (S), and remapping information is written (S). The remapping information specifies the original address of the physical sector, and the remapping address of the physical sector in which the data is written.

Data recording/reproduction for write-once discs

Described is a technology by which a storage volume is shared by cluster nodes of a server cluster. In one implementation, each node includes a redirector that provides shared access to the volume from that node. The redirector routes file system metadata requests from applications and the like through a first (e.g., SMB) communications path to the owning node, and routes file system read and write data to the storage device through a second, high-speed communications path such as direct direct block level I/O. An owning node maintains ownership of the storage device through a persistent reservation mechanism that writes a key to a registration table associated with the storage device. Non-owning nodes write a shared key. The owning node validates the shared keys against cluster membership data, and preempts (e.g., removes) any key deemed not valid. Security mechanisms for controlling access are also described.

Cluster shared volumes

A recording method of the present invention includes the steps of: receiving a write instruction which specifies at least a logical sector in which data is to be written; determining whether the logical sector specified by the write instruction corresponds to a recorded physical sector or an unrecorded physical sector (S); when it is determined that the logical sector specified by the write instruction corresponds to an unrecorded physical sector, writing the data into the unrecorded physical sector (S); and when it is determined that the logical sector specified by the write instruction corresponds to a recorded physical sector, writing the data into an unrecorded physical sector other than the recorded physical sector (S), generating a remapping table including remapping information which remaps an original address of the recorded physical sector to a remapping address of the selected physical sector, and writing the remapping table on the write-once disc (S).

The recording method of the present invention includes the steps of: receiving a write instruction which specifies at least a logical sector in which data is to be written; determining whether the logical sector corresponds to a recorded physical sector or an unrecorded physical sector; when it is determined that the logical sector corresponds to an unrecorded physical sector, writing the data into the unrecorded physical sector, determining whether a verification of the data which has been written into a physical sector is successful, if the verification of the data that has been written is not successful, writing the data into an unrecorded physical sector, generating a remapping table including remapping information which remaps an original address of the physical sector corresponding to the logical sector to a remapping address of the selected physical sector, and writing the remapping table on the write-once disc.

Method and system for establishing and maintaining quotas. An auto quota is defined and applied to a directory. Input and output is monitored to detect a successful operation that involves a subdirectory of the directory. A determination is made as to whether to apply a quota associated with the auto quota to the subdirectory. If the determination is that the quota is to be applied to the subdirectory, it is automatically applied.

Auto quota

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Yarrow Point, WA, United States of America

Rajeev Y Nagar