The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jul. 29, 2003
Filed:
Jun. 04, 1999
Noel S. Otterness, Boulder, CO (US);
Joseph G. Skazinski, Bertoud, CO (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
This invention describes structure and method for an efficient architecture allowing n-controllers to work together to improve system performance and fault tolerance, when n is greater than two. This invention provides a new type of RAID architecture using operational primitives in a message passing multi-controller environment to solve the problems presented in having multiple controllers distribute a non-uniform workload. This architecture allows for expansion of the I/O processing capability limited only by the efficiency of the underlying message transport method. In simple terms, the inventive technique breaks input/output (I/O) operations into a set of simple methods which can then be passed around as tokens, or pieces of work to be executed by whichever controller has the least amount of work to perform. (I/O operations include all operations needed to perform the tasks of a RAID controller. These include host read/write commands, rebuilds, data migration, etc.) The workload distribution adapts to the available and types of processing resources available in the system. The advantage of this type of architecture is that additional processing resources can be added to the system to address specific areas which need higher throughput without the need to rethink the software architecture.