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:
May. 19, 2015
Filed:
Jan. 23, 2014
Netapp, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Ling Zheng, Saratoga, CA (US);
Blake H. Lewis, Los Altos Hills, CA (US);
Kayuri H. Patel, Cupertino, CA (US);
NetApp, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
In one embodiment, snapshots and/or clones of storage objects are created and managed by a volume layer of a storage input/output (I/O) stack executing on one or more nodes of a cluster. Illustratively, the snapshots and clones may be represented as independent volumes, and embodied as respective read-only copies (snapshots) and read-write copies (clones) of a parent volume. Volume metadata is illustratively organized as one or more multi-level dense tree metadata structures, wherein each level of the dense tree metadata structure (dense tree) includes volume metadata entries for storing the metadata. Each snapshot/clone may be derived from a dense tree of the parent volume (parent dense tree). Portions of the parent dense tree may be shared with the snapshot/clone.