International Business Machines Corporation

Netapp, Inc.

Richard Christopher Fore

Dean Alan Kalman

Atul Goel

Simon C Chu

Stephen H Strange

Linda Ann Riedle

Andrew Boyce McNeill, Jr

Mark Elliot Andresen

Kyle Diggs Sterling

Sujatha Pothireddy

Albert Andre Asselin

Timothy Vincent Lee

Vikram Harakere Krishnamurthy

Robert V Miller

David Eduardo Vieira

Luis Rene Quinones

Robert Paul Rowe

Marty Eugene Turner

Methods and systems for a storage environment are provided. For example, one method includes receiving a request from a storage server at an offload engine for reconstructing data lost due to a failed storage device of a parity group having a plurality of storage devices; retrieving data and parity by the offload engine from the parity group storage devices that are operational; determining by the offload engine XOR of the retrieved data and parity; presenting XOR of data and parity by the offload engine to the storage server with context information associated with the retrieved data; and reconstructing lost data by the storage server using the XOR of data and parity and the context information provided by the offload engine.

Methods and systems for offloading RAID parity reconstruction

A method, system and computer program product for performing an expansion of a disk array. Upon the failure of a disk in the disk array, the failed disk may be rebuilt stripe by stripe in the spare units distributed among other disks in the disk array. Upon repairing or replacing the failed disk with a spare disk, the repaired or spare disk may be rebuilt stripe by stripe using the data from the spare units. Upon receiving a write request to a stripe unit that has been rebuilt in the repaired or spare disk during expansion, the data of the request may be written in the stripe unit requested. Further, the data written may be mirrored, i.e., copied and stored, in the spare unit corresponding to the stripe unit requested. By mirroring the data to the corresponding spare unit, tracking each stripe that was updated during expansion may be eliminated.

Partial mirroring during expansion thereby eliminating the need to track the progress of stripes updated during expansion

The peripheral bus connector for improved aggregation of resources of a device on the peripheral bus includes a plurality of aggregation pins, in addition to the pins according to the peripheral bus standard. Signals from a controller on an extended peripheral bus adapter sends and receives signals in addition to standard signals of the peripheral bus through the aggregation pins. The aggregated device is hidden from third parties, and its existence is known only to the controller on the extended peripheral bus adapter. In this manner, resources are aggregated across a peripheral bus without needing the addition of another controller and without the need to redefine standard peripheral bus signals. In addition, standard peripheral bus adapters may still be used in the connector if resource aggregation is not desired.

Connector that enables aggregation of independent system resources across PCI/PCI-X bus and interlocked method for aggregating independent system resources across PCI/PCI-X bus

A method and system for managing data in a data storage system including a plurality of physical storage devices is disclosed. The method and system comprises providing a plurality of modules, where each of the plurality of modules includes at least one child. Each module receives an input command related to the data from a source, where the source is transparent to the module. The module decides to which one of its children to pass the input command, and passes the input command to that child for processing the data accordingly.

Object oriented approach to a redundant array storage system

A method and system for indexing adapters within a data processing system where the data processing system contains multiple existing adapters, where each of the multiple existing adapters is identified by particular indexing data. All adapters within the data processing system are scanned. A determination of whether or not any additional adapters have been added to the data processing system in addition to the multiple existing adapters is made. Particular indexing data is assigned to any additional adapters in response to determining that additional adapters have been added to the data processing system, where any additional adapters added to the data processing system are indexed into the data processing system without changing the particular indexing data of each of the multiple existing adapters.

Method and system for indexing adapters within a data processing system

Growing community of inventors

Apex, NC, United States of America

Richard Christopher Fore