Reducing stable data eviction with synthetic baseline snapshot and eviction state refresh

Abstract

With a forever incremental snapshot configuration and a typical caching policy (e.g., least recently used), a storage appliance may evict stable data blocks of an older snapshot, perhaps unchanged data blocks of the snapshot baseline. If stable data blocks have been evicted, restore of a recent snapshot will suffer the time penalty of downloading the stable blocks for restoring the recent snapshot. Creating synthetic baseline snapshots and refreshing eviction data of stable data blocks can avoid eviction of stable data blocks and reduce the risk of violating a recovery time objective.