Emc Corporation

Adaptec, Inc.

Renato E Maranon

Santosh C Lolayekar

Yu-Ping Cheng

Wan-Hui Lee

Robert Tower Frey

Sanjay Saxena

Enyew Tan

Andrew W Wilson

Paul J Von Stamwitz

Anoop R Hegde

Sunil K Asthana

John Tai

John Carrier

A storage switch in accordance with an embodiment of the invention is a highly scalable switch that allows the creation of a SAN that is easy to deploy and that can be centrally managed. Moreover, such a storage switch also allows the deployment of a global infrastructure, allowing the resources of the SAN, such as storage devices, to essentially be positioned anywhere on the globe. Further, such a storage switch allows a multi-protocol SAN, e.g., one that includes both iSCSI or Fibre Channel, and processes data packets at 'wire speed.' To further enable wire-speed processing, a switch in accordance with the invention has 'intelligence' distributed to each of its linecards, through which it classifies packets into data and control packets, it performs virtualization functions, and it performs protocol translation functions. A switch in accordance with the invention further performs serverless storage services such as mirroring, snapshot, and replication.

Virtualization in a storage system

Storage switch for storage area network

A system in accordance with an embodiment of the invention provides Quality of Service (QoS) for Storage Access. Such QoS is partially enabled in one embodiment by the automatic pooling of storage devices and provisioning virtual targets from those pools. QoS is enforced in one embodiment by keeping the bandwidth for each connection within a specified range, and particularly, by controlling the number of allowed concurrent requests from an initiator. Load balancing is also provided in one embodiment, improving response times for requests, further easing the ability to provide QoS.

Pooling and provisioning storage resources in a storage network

Protocol translation in a storage system

A network stack layer interface is provided for efficient communication between network stack layers. The network stack layer interface includes a header portion that defines various characteristics of the network stack layer interface. In addition, a buffer descriptor is included that defines data that was, or will be, transmitted over the computer network. The buffer descriptor includes a memory address pointer to the data. In this manner, information is passed between network stack layers via the network stack interface, resulting in fast network data transfer with reduced data copying.

Network stack layer interface

Growing community of inventors

Livermore, CA, United States of America

Renato E Maranon