Dell Products Inc.

Emc IP Holding Company LLC

Shao Hu

Rong Yu

Lixin Pang

Peng Wu

Ramesh Doddaiah

Peng Yin

Jiahui Wang

Ningdong Li

Mohammed Asher Vt

One or more aspects of the present disclosure relate to distributing write destaging amongst a storage array's boards. In embodiments, an input/output (IO) workload is received at a storage array. In addition, a write IO request in the IO workload is directed to a target board of a plurality of boards of the storage array based on one or more performance-related hyperparameters of each board. Further, write data of the write IO request to a storage device is destaged by the target board.

Distributed write destaging

A synchronous destage process is used to move data from shared global memory to back-end storage resources. The synchronous destage process is implemented using a client-server model between a data service layer (client) and back-end disk array of a storage system (server). The data service layer initiates a synchronous destage operation by requesting that the back-end disk array move data from one or more slots of global memory to back-end storage resources. The back-end disk array services the request and notifies the data service layer of the status of the destage operation, e.g. a destage success or destage failure. If the destage operation is a success, the data service layer updates metadata to identify the location of the data on back-end storage resources. If the destage operation is not successful, the data service layer re-initiates the destage process by issuing a subsequent destage request to the back-end disk array.

Synchronous destage of write data from shared global memory to back-end storage resources

Distributed failover of a failed BE, and failback of the failed BE when it recovers, are described. A separate pool of memory may be reserved for each BE on a storage system. Each such pool may be further divided into sub-pools. When a BE fails, the one or more other active BEs on the storage system may be notified, and each such active BE may attempt to take ownership of one or more sub-pools of the BE and execute the one or more pending write operations of the failed BE. Upon completing execution of the pending write operations in a failed-over sub-pool, the ownership of the sub-pool may be returned to the failed BE. When the failed BE recovers, the recovered BE may attempt to take back control of one or more of its sub-pools.

Distributed failover of a back-end storage director

Occurrence of a RAID double failure in a slice of a RAID protection group (failed slice) renders data stored in the back-end tracks of the failed slice vulnerable to loss. When a RAID double failure is detected, a new slice is added to the RAID protection group. Front-end tracks that map to the good back-end tracks of the failed slice are moved from the back-end tracks of the failed slice to the back-end tracks of the newly added slice. Any front-end tracks that mapped to the bad back-end tracks of the failed slice are made to be write pending and written to corresponding back-end tracks of the newly added slice. Front-end tracks that map to the bad back-end tracks may be made to be write-pending in connection with a host write operation, by reading the front-end tracks from a local backup, or from a remote backup location.

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Westborough, MA, United States of America

Shao Hu