Hitachi, Ltd.

Tsutomu Sukigara

Hidehiko Iwasaki

Yuichi Otani

Mitsuhiko Oguchi

Takashi Takenaka

Tetsuya Abe

Naoko Kumagai

Tomohiko Hasegawa

Provided is straightforward management of licenses which are assigned to virtual storage spanning a plurality of physical storage. In a storage systemwhich provides virtual storage spanning a plurality of physical storage apparatusesto a host computer, the physical storage apparatusescomprise a controller portionwhich manages storage, and a license management portion (management computer) which manages licenses assigned to virtual storage such that the licenses are shared by the plurality of physical storage apparatusescomprising the virtual storage. In the plurality of physical storage apparatuses, in which the controller portionand the license management portion in the same physical storage apparatussynchronize and retain first information for managing the storage and second information for managing the licenses, and share the licenses, the respective license management portions retain the second information relating to the licenses with the same content.

Storage system and license management method

Conventionally, the fees for using services of a storage system was calculated based on the status of use or access performance of storage areas and not based on migration of data. The present invention provides a storage system in which multiple tiers composed of storage areas of various memory devices are assigned in page units and the assigned tiers are changed based on access frequency, wherein stored costs are calculated based on status of use of the storage areas constituting the tiers, and migration costs are calculated and charged based on the amount of migration of data among tiers and the I/O access counts after migration, according to which appropriate charging of cost for using the storage system is enabled.

Method for calculating tier relocation cost and storage system using the same

A method and system which prevents starting-up problems in plural magnetic disk storage devices included in a disk array system during restart following halt of the magnetic disk storage devices after long term operation. The disk array system includes the plural magnetic disk storage devices, a microprocessor unit (MPU) which controls the magnetic disk storage devices, a control memory, a parity calculator, and cache memory. The control memory contains a operation time control table in which a tolerable continuous operation time Ti and a halt time Ts are stored. Each of the magnetic disk storage devices is intentionally stopped individually for the halt time Ts at time interval of the tolerable continuous operation time Ti. A request for reading data from one magnetic disk storage device under halt is responded to by using a data recovery function, while a request for writing data to a magnetic disk storage device under halt is responded to by writing data to an alternate spare magnetic disk storage device or memory.

Magnetic disk storage device control method, disk array system control method and disk array system

Magnetic disk storage device control method, disk array system control

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Kanagawa, Japan

Tsutomu Sukigara