Netapp, Inc.

Robin Mahony

Oliver Erik Seiler

Vladimir Radu Avram

Dheeraj Raghavender Sangamkar

Song Guen Yoon

Raymond Yu Shun Mak

Chia-Chen Chu

Alvis Yung

Blake Edwards

Gregory Kent

Chong Zhao

Guy Sirton

A distributed storage system may synchronously apply an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) policy to objects at ingest. In one embodiment of synchronous ILM, three options are available for a user: balanced, strict, and dual commit. Dual commit refers to the behavior where one will always create two replicated copies in the same site and then apply ILM asynchronously. Strict refers to the behavior where the storage system attempts to apply the ILM policy synchronously on ingest, and if the storage system cannot the ingest of the object will fail. This ensures that the storage system can guarantee that ILM has been applied to recently ingested objects. Balanced refers to the behavior where the storage system attempts to apply ILM synchronously, but if the storage system cannot the storage system may fall-back to dual-commit.

Synchronous object placement for information lifecycle management

A system, method, and machine-readable storage medium for restoring a data object for a specified active time period are provided. In some embodiments, the method includes receiving, by a storage device from a client, a request specifying an active time period for a data object to remain stored on an accessible tier. The method also includes determining, by the storage device, that the active time period has elapsed. The method further includes responsive to a determination that the active time period has elapsed, sending, by the storage device, a request to a server storing the data object to move the data object from the accessible tier to an archive tier. Data objects that are stored on the accessible tier are accessible by the client, and data objects that are stored on the archive tier are inaccessible by the client.

Object tiering in a distributed storage system

To effectively implement ILM policies and account for unreliability in a geographically distributed large-scale storage system, 'scanners' and 'ILM rules appliers' can be deployed on nodes throughout the storage system for large scale ILM implementation. Each scanner is programmed to deterministically self-assign a region of object namespace and scan that region of object namespace. To &#x201c;scan&#x201d; a region, a scanner accesses metadata of each object that has an identifier within the scanner's region and inserts the object metadata into one of a set of queues for ILM evaluation. An ILM rules applier dequeues object metadata for evaluation against ILM rules and determines whether an ILM task is to be performed for ILM rule compliance.

Iterative object scanning for information lifecycle management

Growing community of inventors

Vancouver, Canada

Robin Mahony