Netapp, Inc.

Sangramsinh Pandurang Pawar

William D Dallas

Rajesh Rajaraman

Per Olov Wahlstrom

Joseph Brown

Houze Xu

Bhoovaraghan Subramanian

John David McA'Nulty

Sowkoor Sunad Bhandary

Fnu Sahasranshu

Rajesh Rajarman

James Silva

John DeGraaf

Jing Zhang

Javier Tsuyoshi Takimoto

Michael Scott Ryan

Vijay Chandra Hanchatey

Ruitao Duan

Nan Li

Systems and methods for verifying an executable portion of a published cloud image represents an unaltered version of an executable portion of a corresponding original cloud image are provided. In one embodiment, modification of a predefined portion of a cloud image by a cloud provider prior to its publication via a marketplace of the cloud provider is proactively addressed as part of (i) an automated signing process performed by a software publisher on the original cloud image prior to delivery to the cloud provider and (ii) a corresponding background verification process performed on the published cloud image on behalf of users by a management platform. The signing and verification processes are operable to exclude the predefined portion when creating their respective digests, thereby allowing the signed digest created prior to the modification to remain useful as part of a subsequent digest comparison performed by the verification process.

Verification of a published image having a predefined portion that has been altered by a cloud provider prior to being made available via a marketplace of the cloud provider

Systems and methods for flushing an operation log journal to both ephemeral storage and persistent storage during a shutdown sequence of a virtual storage system to minimize data-loss scenarios are provided. According to one embodiment, the shutdown or reboot scenarios that result in loss of data are minimized by using persistent storage as a backup to ephemeral storage when the scenario results in rehosting of virtual storage system. For example, responsive to an event indicative of an imminent shutdown or reboot of the virtual storage system, vNVRAM memory may be flushed to both ephemeral storage and persistent storage (e.g., a boot disk). In this manner, when the virtual storage system is rehosted after an unplanned shutdown or reboot resulting from an unrecoverable host error (other than an unrecoverable hardware failure), the operation log journal may be recovered from persistent storage to facilitate vNVRAM replay and avoid data loss.

Reducing potential data-loss scenarios when using ephemeral storage as backing storage for journaling by a virtual storage system

Systems and methods for making use of non-persistent storage as the journaling storage media for a virtual storage system are provided. According to one embodiment, in order to meet the needs of Extreme Low Latency Workloads while also seeking to provide predictable performance and the lowest possible latency, ephemeral storage of the virtual storage system is used to preserve state information (e.g., in the form of boot arguments and an operation log journal) across a host failure recovery scenario in which the virtual storage system is expected to be redeployed within a compute instance brought up by a cloud environment of a hyperscaler on the same host, thereby providing improved data durability (fewer host failure scenarios that result in lost data) as compared to the use of ephemeral memory of the compute instance and lower write latency than the use of persistent storage provided by the cloud environment.

Using ephemeral storage as backing storage for journaling by a virtual storage system

Systems and methods for performing a fast resynchronization of a mirrored aggregate of a distributed storage system using disk-level cloning are provided. According to one embodiment, responsive to a failure of a disk of a plex of the mirrored aggregate utilized by a high-availability (HA) pair of nodes of a distributed storage system, disk-level clones of the disks of a healthy plex may be created external to the distributed storage system and attached to the degraded HA partner node. After detection of the cloned disks by the degraded HA partner node, mirror protection may be efficiently re-established by assimilating the cloned disks within the failed plex and then resynchronizing the mirrored aggregate by performing a level-1 resync of the failed plex with the healthy plex based on a base file system snapshot of the healthy plex. In this manner, a more time-consuming level-0 resync may be avoided.

Fast resynchronization of a mirrored aggregate using disk-level cloning

Systems and methods for multiple device consumption of shared namespaces of ephemeral storage devices by a consumer of a virtual storage system are provided. In an example, multiple namespaces of respective ephemeral storage devices are shared among multiple of consumers of a virtual storage system by creating multiple partitions within each of the namespaces for use by respective consumers of the multiple consumers. Corresponding partitions of respective shared namespace may then be treated as a stripe set to facilitate multiple device consumption for a subsystem (e.g., operation log journaling) of the virtual storage system by striping data associated with input/output (I/O) requests of a consumer (e.g., a journaling driver) across one or more stripe units of one or more stripes within the stripe set.

Facilitating multiple device consumption of shared namespaces of ephmermal storage devices by a consumer of a virtual storage device

Systems and methods for performing a fast resynchronization of a mirrored aggregate of a distributed storage system using disk-level cloning are provided. According to one embodiment, responsive to a failure of a disk of a plex of the mirrored aggregate utilized by a high-availability (HA) pair of nodes of a distributed storage system, disk-level clones of the disks of the healthy plex may be created external to the distributed storage system and attached to the degraded HA partner node. After detection of the cloned disks by the degraded HA partner node, mirror protection may be efficiently re-established by assimilating the cloned disks within the failed plex and then resynchronizing the mirrored aggregate by performing a level-1 resync of the failed plex with the healthy plex based on a base file system snapshot of the healthy plex. In this manner, a more time-consuming level-0 resync may be avoided.

Techniques are provided for backing up and restoring a file system or storage virtual machine located within a remote object store. A specification is parsed to identify resources associated with and including a primary resource hosted within a remote object store and to identify REST API endpoints of the resources. GET operations targeting the REST API endpoints of the resources are performed to retrieve the resources and properties of the resources. A link relationship specification is parsed to identify links corresponding to dependencies amongst the resources. A backup of the primary resource is generated to include the resources, the properties of the resources, and dependency information derived from the links. The backup can be used to restore the primary resource to the remote object store in manner that preserves the dependencies amongst the resources.

Backup and restore of resources located within a remote object store

Systems and methods for facilitating performance of data tiering by detecting and persisting types of backing storage of cloud volumes that are available for use by a virtual storage system are provided. In one example, during a boot phase of the virtual storage system within a compute instance of a cloud environment, information regarding a type of backing storage for each of multiple storage devices associated with the compute instance that is not available via hypervisor APIs is obtained via an API exposed by the cloud environment. The multiple storage devices may then be initialized to facilitate subsequent use of a subset thereof in connection with performing data tiering by persisting information indicative of the type of backing storage for the storage device within a reserved header region on each storage device.

Growing community of inventors

Bedford, MA, United States of America

Sangramsinh Pandurang Pawar