Dell Products Inc.

Emc IP Holding Company LLC

Yuri Kotov

Andrey Markov

Dmitry Ashkadov

Mikhail Tolstoy

Vladislav Alekseev

Mikhail Saravayskiy

A Virtual Tape Emulation (VTE) application is able to be updated without disrupting IO operations by hosts on a set of virtual tape drives managed by the VTE application. When an old VTE application is to be replaced with a new VTE application, the new VTE application is provided with the same configuration information as the old VTE application. Each time a host unmounts a virtual tape from a virtual tape drive on the old VTE application, device management for that virtual tape drive is migrated from the old VTE application to the new VTE application. Specifically, path and channel information for the virtual tape drive is transferred to the new VTE application, and applied by the new VTE application to a respective device on the new VTE application. Once device management for all virtual tape drives has been transferred, the old VTE application is terminated.

Non-disruptive updating of virtual tape emulation applications

A virtual tape library system includes multiple copies of a LockFS that are mounted on all nodes. One of the LockFSs is designated as the active copy. A primary node manages recovery when a secondary node signals loss of connectivity with the active copy by posting a sync request file to at least one of the LockFSs. The primary node posts status request files to the LockFSs and the secondary nodes respond by writing status to the status request files. A LockFS that is reachable by all nodes is selected as the new active LockFS. Switchover is accomplished by the primary node posting a disable request file to the selected LockFS and waiting for all secondary nodes to acknowledge by writing to the disable request file. The primary node then posts an activate request file to the selected LockFS and waits for all secondary nodes to acknowledge by writing to the activate request file.

Automatic recovery of locking filesystem shared between virtual tape library nodes

Migrating virtual tapes between different virtual tape storages without host involvement is described herein. A system as described herein can include a local tape library comprising respective storage devices; a memory that stores executable components; and a processor that executes the executable components stored in the memory. The executable components can comprise a connection component that establishes a first connection to a host system and a second connection to an external tape library; a request processing component that receives an access request for a requested storage device from the host system via the first connection; and a proxy component that accesses the requested storage device at the outside tape library via the second connection and enables access to the requested storage device by the host system via the first connection in response to the requested storage device being determined to be absent from the local tape library.

Migrating virtual tapes between different virtual tape storages without host involvement

A mechanism for transparent (or non-disruptive) virtual tape engines restart. Specifically, the disclosed mechanism entails preserving a pre-restart state prior to restarting a virtual tape engine, followed by restoring the pre-restart state after the restarting in order to achieve transparency.

Growing community of inventors

Saint Petersburg, Russia

Yuri Kotov