31334results about "Memory adressing/allocation/relocation" patented technology

Multiple applications request data from multiple storage units over a computer network. The data is divided into segments and each segment is distributed randomly on one of several storage units, independent of the storage units on which other segments of the media data are stored. At least one additional copy of each segment also is distributed randomly over the storage units, such that each segment is stored on at least two storage units. This random distribution of multiple copies of segments of data improves both scalability and reliability. When an application requests a selected segment of data, the request is processed by the storage unit with the shortest queue of requests. Random fluctuations in the load applied by multiple applications on multiple storage units are balanced nearly equally over all of the storage units. This combination of techniques results in a system which can transfer multiple, independent high-bandwidth streams of data in a scalable manner in both directions between multiple applications and multiple storage units.

A management capability is provided for a virtual computing platform. In one example, this platform allows interconnected physical resources such as processors, memory, network interfaces and storage interfaces to be abstracted and mapped to virtual resources (e.g., virtual mainframes, virtual partitions). Virtual resources contained in a virtual partition can be assembled into virtual servers that execute a guest operating system (e.g., Linux). In one example, the abstraction is unique in that any resource is available to any virtual server regardless of the physical boundaries that separate the resources. For example, any number of physical processors or any amount of physical memory can be used by a virtual server even if these resources span different nodes. A virtual computing platform is provided that allows for the creation, deletion, modification, control (e.g., start, stop, suspend, resume) and status (i.e., events) of the virtual servers which execute on the virtual computing platform and the management capability provides controls for these functions. In a particular example, such a platform allows the number and type of virtual resources consumed by a virtual server to be scaled up or down when the virtual server is running. For instance, an administrator may scale a virtual server manually or may define one or more policies that automatically scale a virtual server. Further, using the management API, a virtual server can monitor itself and can scale itself up or down depending on its need for processing, memory and I / O resources. For example, a virtual server may monitor its CPU utilization and invoke controls through the management API to allocate a new processor for itself when its utilization exceeds a specific threshold. Conversely, a virtual server may scale down its processor count when its utilization falls. Policies can be used to execute one or more management controls. More specifically, a management capability is provided that allows policies to be defined using management object's properties, events and / or method results. A management policy may also incorporate external data (e.g., an external event) in its definition. A policy may be triggered, causing the management server or other computing entity to execute an action. An action may utilize one or more management controls. In addition, an action may access external capabilities such as sending notification e-mail or sending a text message to a telephone paging system. Further, management capability controls may be executed using a discrete transaction referred to as a “job.” A series of management controls may be assembled into a job using one or management interfaces. Errors that occur when a job is executed may cause the job to be rolled back, allowing affected virtual servers to return to their original state.

Storage virtualization systems and methods that allow customers to manage storage as a utility rather than as islands of storage which are independent of each other. A demand mapped virtual disk image of up to an arbitrarily large size is presented to a host system. The virtualization system allocates physical storage from a storage pool dynamically in response to host I / O requests, e.g., SCSI I / O requests, allowing for the amortization of storage resources-through a disk subsystem while maintaining coherency amongst I / O RAID traffic. In one embodiment, the virtualization functionality is implemented in a controller device, such as a controller card residing in a switch device or other network device, coupled to a storage system on a storage area network (SAN). The resulting virtual disk image that is observed by the host computer is larger than the amount of physical storage actually consumed.

Systems and methods for protecting data in a tiered storage system are provided. The storage system comprises a management server, a media management component connected to the management server, a plurality of storage media connected to the media management component, and a data source connected to the media management component. Source data is copied from a source to a buffer to produce intermediate data. The intermediate data is copied to both a first and second medium to produce a primary and auxiliary copy, respectively. An auxiliary copy may be made from another auxiliary copy. An auxiliary copy may also be made from a primary copy right before the primary copy is pruned.

A method for generating a unique device ID for each addressable device in a stack of multiple addressable devices by encoding a device ID for one device in the stack and determining a device ID for each of the other devices based on the device ID of an adjacent device in the stack.

A level of abstraction is created between a set of physical processors and a set of virtual multiprocessors to form a virtualized data center. This virtualized data center comprises a set of virtual, isolated systems separated by a boundary referred as a partition. Each of these systems appears as a unique, independent virtual multiprocessor computer capable of running a traditional operating system and its applications. In one embodiment, the system implements this multi-layered abstraction via a group of microkernels, each of which communicates with one or more peer microkernel over a high-speed, low-latency interconnect and forms a distributed virtual machine monitor. Functionally, a virtual data center is provided, including the ability to take a collection of servers and execute a collection of business applications over a compute fabric comprising commodity processors coupled by an interconnect. Processor, memory and I / O are virtualized across this fabric, providing a single system, scalability and manageability. According to one embodiment, this virtualization is transparent to the application, and therefore, applications may be scaled to increasing resource demands without modifying the application.

A virtualization infrastructure that allows multiple guest partitions to run within a host hardware partition. The host system is divided into distinct logical or virtual partitions and special infrastructure partitions are implemented to control resource management and to control physical I / O device drivers that are, in turn, used by operating systems in other distinct logical or virtual guest partitions. Host hardware resource management runs as a tracking application in a resource management “ultravisor” partition, while host resource management decisions are performed in a higher level command partition based on policies maintained in a separate operations partition. The conventional hypervisor is reduced to a context switching and containment element (monitor) for the respective partitions, while the system resource management functionality is implemented in the ultravisor partition. The ultravisor partition maintains the master in-memory database of the hardware resource allocations and serves a command channel to accept transactional requests for assignment of resources to partitions. It also provides individual read-only views of individual partitions to the associated partition monitors. Host hardware I / O management is implemented in special redundant I / O partitions. Operating systems in other logical or virtual partitions communicate with the I / O partitions via memory channels established by the ultravisor partition. The guest operating systems in the respective logical or virtual partitions are modified to access monitors that implement a system call interface through which the ultravisor, I / O, and any other special infrastructure partitions may initiate communications with each other and with the respective guest partitions. The guest operating systems are modified so that they do not attempt to use the “broken” instructions in the x86 system that complete virtualization systems must resolve by inserting traps. System resources are separated into zones that are managed by a separate partition containing resource management policies that may be implemented across nodes to implement a virtual data center.

A computer system may be configured to dynamically select a memory virtualization and corresponding virtual-to-physical address translation technique during execution of an application and to dynamically employ the selected technique in place of a current technique without re-initializing the application. The computer system may be configured to determine that a current address translation technique incurs a high overhead for the application's current workload and may be configured to select a different technique dependent on various performance criteria and / or a user policy. Dynamically employing the selected technique may include reorganizing a memory, reorganizing a translation table, allocating a different block of memory to the application, changing a page or segment size, or moving to or from a page-based, segment-based, or function-based address translation technique. A selected translation technique may be dynamically employed for the application independent of a translation technique employed for a different application.

A method of pre-fetching and preparing content in an information processing system is provided. The method includes the steps of generating at least one content pre-fetching policy and at least one content preparation policy, wherein each of the policies are at least in part a function of context information associated with a user. The content is pre-fetched based on information contained within the at least one content pre-fetching policy. Once the content has been pre-fetched, it is prepared based on information contained within the at least one content preparation policy. The context information associated with the user includes at least one of the user's usage patterns, current location, future plans and preferences.

A runtime adaptable search processor is disclosed. The search processor provides high speed content search capability to meet the performance need of network line rates growing to 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps and higher. The search processor provides a unique combination of NFA and DFA based search engines that can process incoming data in parallel to perform the search against the specific rules programmed in the search engines. The processor architecture also provides capabilities to transport and process Internet Protocol (IP) packets from Layer 2 through transport protocol layer and may also provide packet inspection through Layer 7. Further, a runtime adaptable processor is coupled to the protocol processing hardware and may be dynamically adapted to perform hardware tasks as per the needs of the network traffic being sent or received and / or the policies programmed or services or applications being supported. A set of engines may perform pass-through packet classification, policy processing and / or security processing enabling packet streaming through the architecture at nearly the full line rate. A high performance content search and rules processing security processor is disclosed which may be used for application layer and network layer security. Scheduler schedules packets to packet processors for processing. An internal memory or local session database cache stores a session information database for a certain number of active sessions. The session information that is not in the internal memory is stored and retrieved to / from an additional memory. An application running on an initiator or target can in certain instantiations register a region of memory, which is made available to its peer(s) for access directly without substantial host intervention through RDMA data transfer. A security system is also disclosed that enables a new way of implementing security capabilities inside enterprise networks in a distributed manner using a protocol processing hardware with appropriate security features.

Embodiments of the invention relate to transactional memory execution utilizing virtual memory. A processor includes a local transactional cache and a resource manager. The resource manager responsive to a transactional memory transaction request from a requesting thread determines whether the local transactional cache is capable of accommodating the transactional memory transaction request and, if so, the local transactional caches performs the transactional memory transaction. However, if the local transactional cache is not capable of accommodating the transactional memory transaction request, data for the transactional memory transaction request is overflowed into an application's virtual address space associated with the requesting thread.

A virtualization infrastructure that allows multiple guest partitions to run within a host hardware partition. The host system is divided into distinct logical or virtual partitions and special infrastructure partitions are implemented to control resource management and to control physical I / O device drivers that are, in turn, used by operating systems in other distinct logical or virtual guest partitions. Host hardware resource management runs as a tracking application in a resource management “ultravisor” partition, while host resource management decisions are performed in a higher level command partition based on policies maintained in a separate operations partition. The conventional hypervisor is reduced to a context switching and containment element (monitor) for the respective partitions, while the system resource management functionality is implemented in the ultravisor partition. The ultravisor partition maintains the master in-memory database of the hardware resource allocations and serves a command channel to accept transactional requests for assignment of resources to partitions. It also provides individual read-only views of individual partitions to the associated partition monitors. Host hardware I / O management is implemented in special redundant I / O partitions. Operating systems in other logical or virtual partitions communicate with the I / O partitions via memory channels established by the ultravisor partition. The guest operating systems in the respective logical or virtual partitions are modified to access monitors that implement a system call interface through which the ultravisor, I / O, and any other special infrastructure partitions may initiate communications with each other and with the respective guest partitions. The guest operating systems are modified so that they do not attempt to use the “broken” instructions in the x86 system that complete virtualization systems must resolve by inserting traps.

A single-chip microcomputer comprising: a first bus having a central processing unit and a cache memory connected therewith; a second bus having a dynamic memory access control circuit and an external bus interface connected therewith; a break controller for connecting the first bus and the second bus selectively; a third bus having a peripheral module connected therewith and having a lower-speed bus cycle than the bus cycles of the first and second buses; and a bus state controller for effecting a data transfer and a synchronization between the second bus and the third bus. The single-chip microcomputer has the three divided internal buses to reduce the load capacity upon the signal transmission paths so that the signal transmission can be accomplished at a high speed. Moreover, the peripheral module required to have no operation speed is isolated so that the power dissipation can be reduced.