Emc Corporation

Emc IP Holding Company LLC

Uresh K Vahalia

Percy Tzelnic

Uday K Gupta

Xiaoye Jiang

Jean-Pierre Bono

John Forecast

Dennis P J Ting

Betti Porat

Steven T McClure

Wayne William Duso

Dennis P Ting

Matthew H Fredette

Philippe Armangau

Natan Vishlitzky

Steven M Blumenau

Sairam Veeraswamy

Erez Ofer

John T Fitzgerald

Morgan A Clark

John Michael Hayden

Jiannan Zheng

Sachin Mullick

James M McGillis

Mark C Lippitt

Mark A Kaufman

Aju John

Sudhir Srinivasan

Madhav Mutalik

Steven R Chalmer

Patrick Brian Riordan

Milena Bergant

Jeffrey Jon Darcy

Boris Zuckerman

Hongliang Tang

Dinesh Venkatesh

Edgar J St Pierre

Lev Vaitzblit

Sanjay Jain

Hal J Hansen

Paul M Bober

Gang Ma

Saurabh Ramchandra Godbole

Puneet B Lal

Jeffrey Louis Alexander

Scott R Dunham

Raymond Angelone

Suchitra Raman

Steve Chalmer

Fengcheng Lu

Rulian W Fiske

John A Hilliar

Leslie E Kuczynski

Ronald Curtis Searls

Yikang Xu

Kannan M Alagappan

Lixin Pang

Kang Wei

Operating a hypervisor includes running a hypervisor as a thread of an underlying operating system and loading a guest operating system using the hypervisor based on the thread of the underlying operating system, where the hypervisor runs independently of the guest operating system and independently of other hypervisors running as other threads of the underlying operating system. The hypervisor may be a first hypervisor and operating a hypervisor may further include running a second hypervisor nested with the first hypervisor, where the guest operating system may be loaded using both the first hypervisor and the second hypervisor. The underlying operating system may be an operating system of a storage system.

Nested hypervisors with peripheral component interconnect pass-through

Controlling access to resources using independent and nested hypervisors in a storage system environment

Global memory of a storage system may be used to provide NVRAM capabilities to guest operating systems accessing the storage system. The non-volatility of NVRAM (i.e. that retains its information when power is turned off) provides that an NVRAM device provided by global memory may be used as a journaling device to track storage operations and facilitate recovery and/or failover processing in a storage system without needing to add additional hardware and/or other installed devices. Use of the global memory according to the system described herein to provide an NVRAM device, that may function as a journaling device, provides for the speeding up of transactions, thereby improving metadata intensive operations performance and reducing recovery time and/or failover time of a storage system without adding additional hardware support.

Global memory as non-volatile random access memory for guest operating systems

A method, system and apparatus of a file locking within a network file system federated namespace is disclosed. In one embodiment, a method includes accessing a target file in a storage medium over a network through an intermediate proxy server using a processor. The storage medium may be any one storage medium of a group of storage mediums on the network forming a data sharing cluster. In addition, the method includes locking the target file in the storage medium through a lock protocol to enable an access to modify the target file to at most one user at any given time, via the intermediate proxy server.

System and method of file locking in a network file system federated namespace

A file system that utilizes Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) addressing and routing schemes to permit implementing multiple networked file system applications in a single data processing system. In particular, a networked file server or data mover has associated with it a mass storage device such as one or more disk drives, as well as one or more Network Interface Cards (NICs). A network interface to the data mover is associated with VLAN identifiers (IDs) such that a VLAN ID can be assigned to each file system. At the physical layer of the data mover, VLAN information is encapsulated and passed up to various higher protocol layers, such as a network layer and/or a transport layer, eventually to a selected file system as dictated by the VLAN ID. The file system application in effect becomes an addressable element of the VLAN. A single data mover can thus be deployed to service multiple groups of end users, as long as the members of each group have different VLAN identifiers for the multiple file systems. The result provides security, access restrictions, and all the other benefits of VLAN protocols that would be obtained by deploying separate data movers for each VLAN, without incurring the acquisition expense and administrative overhead associated with having to purchase and maintain multiple data mover systems.

File system for virtual local area network

This invention is a system and method for managing data in a secure manner in a data storage environment that is in communication with a network including an internet-based network. The system includes logic for securely managing internet client's access to data volumes stored on a data storage system, and may also include logic operating with a file server for providing dynamic access of data available to such clients in a secure fashion.

Method and system for securing network access to dynamically updateable data stored in a data storage system

This invention is a system and for managing data in a secure manner in a data storage environment that is in communication with a network including an internet-based network. The system includes computer-executable logic or software for securely managing internet client's access to data volumes stored on a data storage system, and may also include logic operating with a file server for providing dynamic access of data available to such client's in a secure fashion.

Method and system for securing network access to data stored in a data storage system

A network file server includes a first set of data processors for receiving requests from clients, and a second set of data processors for accessing read-write file systems. A respective data processor in the second set is assigned to each file system for exclusive management of read and write locks on the file system. Each data processor in the first set can authorize access to file systems directly accessed by more than one data processor in the second set. Processing of a request for access that is authorized is continued by the data processor that is assigned to manage the locks on the file system to be accessed. The exclusivity of lock management eliminates cache coherency problems, and dynamic load balancing can be used to prevent the lock management from becoming a bottleneck to performance. A preferred embodiment includes a cached disk storage subsystem linked to data mover computers. Each data mover has authorization and ownership information for a plurality of file systems, and maintains a local cache of locking information for file systems that the data mover can directly access. The data mover receives a client request, and if access is authorized, checks whether it can directly access the file, and if not, forwards the request to another data mover.

Network file server sharing local caches of file access information in data processors assigned to respective file systems

A self healing file system is designed for proactive detection and containment of faults, errors, and corruptions, in order to enable in place (online) and non-intrusive recovery. For proactive fault detection, the file system maintains certain per-block metadata of each file system block. The per-block metadata includes a redundancy check, and for file system data blocks, an inode identifier, and an offset of the file system data block in the file including the file system data block. The redundancy check is used to detect and mark bad file system blocks. The inode identifier and offset is used for validating connectivity of the file system blocks to the inodes, and for tracing bad blocks to files that contain the bad blocks.

Self healing file system

A container file system is built on a sparse metavolume for enhanced decoupling of logical storage from physical storage and for providing common supplementary storage services for iSCSI block access and for NFS or CIFS file system access. The container file system contains a production file system or iSCSI LUN and may also contain snapshot copies of the production file system or iSCSI LUN. The container file system manages storage space among the production file system or iSCSI LUN and its snapshot copies, and also improves fault containment. The sparse metavolume provides thin provisioning of the container file system. A slice map indicates whether or not each slice of logical storage in the sparse metavolume is provisioned with an associated configured slice of data storage.

Thin provisioning of a file system and an iSCSI LUN through a common mechanism

Metadata management in a file server or storage network is delegated from a primary data processor to a secondary data processor in order to reduce data traffic between the primary data processor and the secondary data processor. The primary data processor retains responsibility for managing locks upon objects in the file system that it owns, and also retains responsibility for allocation of free blocks and inodes of the file system. By leasing free blocks and inodes to the secondary and granting locks to the secondary, the secondary can perform the other metadata management tasks such as appending blocks to a file, truncating a file, creating a file, and deleting a file.

Delegation of metadata management in a storage system by leasing of free file system blocks from a file system owner

Consistent updates are made automatically over a wide-area IP network, concurrently with read-only access to the remote copies. A replication control protocol (RCP) is layered over TCP/IP providing the capability for a remote site to replicate and rebroadcast blocks of the remote copy data to specified groups of destinations, as configured in a routing table. A volume multicast layer over RCP provides for multicasting to specified volume extents of the blocks. The blocks are copied at the logical level, so that it does not matter what physical structure is used for storing the remote copies. Save volumes buffer the remote copy data transmitted between the primary or secondary file system volume and the IP network, in order to ensure independence between the replication process, the IP transport method, and the primary file system being replicated.

Replication of remote copy data for internet protocol (IP) transmission

A client is permitted to send data access commands directly to network data storage of a network file server after obtaining a lock on at least a portion of the file and obtaining metadata indicating storage locations for the data in the data storage. For example, the client sends to the file server at least one request for access to a file. In response, the file server grants a lock to the client, and returns to the client metadata of the file including information specifying data storage locations in the network data storage for storing data of the file. The client receives the metadata, and uses the metadata to produce at least one data access command for accessing the data storage locations in the network storage. The client sends the data access command to the network data storage to read or write data to the file. For a write operation, the client may modify the metadata. When the client is finished writing to the file, the client returns any modified metadata to the file server.

File server system providing direct data sharing between clients with a server acting as an arbiter and coordinator

Internally, a production file system and each of its related snapshot file systems have a common file system identifier (fid') and a unique respective file system identifier (fsid&#x2032;). Externally, the production file system and each of its related snapshot file systems has a common file system identifier (fsid) and a unique respective file identifier (fid). For example, the 'fsid' and 'fid' for the production and snapshot file systems are interchanged between a client-server protocol layer and a logical volume layer in a file server. Moreover, the file handle for an object indicates whether an object is in either a production file system that is not configured to have related snapshots, a production file system that is configured to have related snapshots, or a snapshot file system. When the object is in a snapshot file system, the file handle also indicates the related production file system.

Client-server protocol for directory access of snapshot file systems in a storage system

Growing community of inventors

Newton, MA, United States of America

Uresh K Vahalia