Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.P.

Emc IP Holding Company LLC

Richard Mark Stern

Mark Chamness

James Russell Curtis

Rachel L Traylor

A method of minimizing rebuild times within a large-scale data storage system, such as a RAID array by: maintaining a spare disk for a plurality of disks within a disk array; monitoring the plurality of disks for occurrence of one or more pre-failure indicators; maintaining, for each disk, a count of the occurrences of the pre-failure indicators; comparing the count for each disk to a defined threshold value; and copying the first disk and mirroring write operations to the first disk to the spare disk if the count for the first disk exceeds the threshold. The method switches the copying to the spare disk from the first disk to a second disk if the count for the second disk exceeds the count for the first disk. In this manner, certain predictive information can be used to use the spare disk to reduce RAID rebuild times to near instantaneous periods.

Early raid rebuild to improve reliability

Systems and methods are disclosed for predicting failure of a hard disk in a storage system. Embodiments are disclosed that predict failure of at least one hard disk in a storage system having a plurality hard disks. A data center reports to a data collection center than a hard disk has reported an initial non-zero medium error count (NMEC). The data collection center stores historic data of initial NMEC for many hard disks, and subsequent failure of those hard disks. From the historic data, the data collection center can report to the data center a prediction of when a hard disk reporting an initial NMEC may fail. Different models of hard disks fail at different times relative to a reported initial NMEC. The data collection center can track historic hard disk data by manufacturer, model of hard disk, and by model of storage system and thus can predict, by hard disk model, a probability of failure of a hard disk.

Prediction of disk failure

A method is provided that includes performing first and second exclusive activation checks separately on first and second storage units, respectively, with a node using a software RAID function and activating a RAID disk with the first storage unit and the second storage unit using the software RAID function in response to the first and the second exclusive activation checks indicating that the first and the second storage units, respectively, can be activated as the RAID disk by the node.

System and method for activating a raid disk

A virtual machine is migrated from a source physical machine to a target physical machine, where the virtual machine has an executable service and a monitoring agent for monitoring the executable service. In response to the migrating, a monitoring manager is started that issues a command to start the executable service. It is determined whether the command is for the executable service that is already running in the migrated virtual machine. In response to such determining, the started monitoring manager is associated with the already running executable service, where the monitoring manager cooperates with the monitoring agent to detect fault of the executable service.

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Saratoga, CA, United States of America

Richard Mark Stern