Emc IP Holding Company LLC

Emc Corporation

Slavik Neymer

Assaf Natanzon

Jehuda Shemer

Saar Cohen

Leehod Baruch

Arieh Don

Valerie Lotosh

Xiali He

Alexandra Solan

David Meiri

Vinay G Rao

Kfir Wolfson

Anestis Panidis

Erez Sharvit

Lev Ayzenberg

John W Bates

Brian Riordan

Arich Don

Lehood Baruch

Methods and apparatus are provided for consistency group replication with reduced resource consumption. An exemplary method comprises: obtaining, by one or more first replication appliances at a first location, one of (i) data generated by a monitored application; and (ii) metadata for each write operation generated by the monitored application, wherein a splitter function provides the data or metadata to the one or more first replication appliances based on a dynamic determination of whether the monitored application requires replication based on the data or the metadata based on predefined application consistency group type criteria; obtaining, by one or more of the first replication appliances, a snapshot comprising the data associated with each of the write operations since a prior snapshot based on the one of the data and the corresponding metadata; and providing the snapshot to one or more second replication appliances at a different location for storage in a replication journal.

Methods and apparatus for consistency group replication with reduced resource consumption

A method, system, and computer program product for determining a consistent point in time in a replication environment comprising determining periods of time that no IO was received from sources; wherein the periods are determined to account for differences between the clocks of the sources and the clock at a replication appliance, adjusting the periods of time that no IO was received by at least one delay factor, comparing the adjusted periods of time from the sources to determine a common period of time; wherein the common point in time denotes that each source was in a consistent state and marking the adjusted point in time as a consistent point in time in a journal.

Consistency determination

A cloud storage replica of a production device is created and asynchronously updated. A snap, clone or portion of the replica is copied to a cloud gateway in a failover situation. Access to replica images may be obtained via other cloud gateways.

Cloud storage replica of a storage array device

In one aspect, a method includes separating a set of virtual machines from a first consistency group to a second consistency group and third consistency group. The method also includes combining a first virtual machine of the second consistency group to the third consistency group to form a fourth consistency group.

Virtual machine joining or separating

A computer implemented method, system, and computer program product for use in replication comprising receiving an IO at a splitter at a production site from a host, determining if the IO is to a predicted location, wherein a predicted location is a location predicted to correspond to a future write to an image on the production site, and splitting the IO based on the decision.

Predicting IO

A technique for storing data operates a replication splitter in a host computing device. The host computing device runs an application and monitors write performance from the application to both a data storage array and a replication site. If the monitored performance indicates that writes to the replication site would not significantly slow down the application, the replication splitter operates in synchronous mode, in which the splitter waits to acknowledge writes from the application until it receives confirmation of write completion from both the data storage array and the replication site. However, if the monitored performance indicates that writes to the replication site would significantly slow down the application, the replication splitter operates in asynchronous mode, in which the splitter acknowledges writes from the application as soon as it receives confirmation that the data storage array has completed those writes and without waiting for acknowledgements from the replication site.

Dynamically selecting between sync and async replication modes

A method, system, and program product for intercepting an IO from a host running a virtual machine directed to a virtual machine disk at a splitter, wherein the host is being replicated by data protection appliances, adding ordering information to the IO, sending the IO to the virtual machine disk, determining one data protection appliance of the data protection appliances to replication the IO, and sending the IO to the one of the data protection appliances.

Replication ordering

A changed block bitmap of a volume of storage is represented by a data marker that includes an offset to a first dirty block and an offset to a last dirty block. The blocks between the first and last dirty blocks are represented by contiguous clean block identifiers, contiguous dirty block identifiers, and contiguous mixed clean and dirty block identifiers. The contiguous clean block identifiers and contiguous dirty block identifiers use one or two bits to indicate identifier type. The remaining bits indicate a numerical count of contiguous clean or dirty blocks. The contiguous mixed clean and dirty block identifiers may use one bit per block to indicate change status. The data marker may be smaller than a corresponding changed block bitmap.

Efficient data marker representation

A method, system, and computer program product for use in a replication environment comprising intercepting an IO sent from a host to a storage device in a splitter, marking information about the IO in a tracking structure, sending the IO to the storage device, and sending the IO to a replication device; wherein the IO is sent to the storage device before confirming that the replication device has received the IO.

Asynchronous replication

In one aspect, a method includes providing a splitter at a first storage array, receiving data from a host, storing the data on the first storage array, using a data protection appliance (DPA) to expose a device, continuously copying data stored on the first storage array to the device using the splitter and replicating the data to a second storage array using the DPA.

Growing community of inventors

Petah Tikva, Israel

Slavik Neymer