Method for allocating mass storage resources according to needs in heterogeneous SAN (Storage Area Network) environment

Abstract

The invention relates to a method for allocating mass storage resources according to needs in a heterogeneous SAN (Storage Area Network) environment, belonging to the field of storage area networks, in particular to the technical field of storage virtualization therein. The invention is characterized by designing and realizing an out-of-band storage virtualization system aiming at a heterogeneousstorage application server and various storage devices in the SAN environment and providing a method for allocating the mass storage resources according to needs based on allocation while writing anddynamic address mapping mechanism on the basis of the system. The method can be used for allocating the storage resources according to the actual needs of applications, dynamically expanding the mapping relation between the logic storage space and the physical storage space, effectively increasing the utilization rate of the storage resources and the expandability of storage capacity, reducing the maintenance cost of the storage devices and realizing instant storage purchase.

Description

technical field [0001] A method for realizing on-demand allocation of massive storage resources in a heterogeneous SAN environment belongs to the field of storage area networks, and in particular relates to the field of storage virtualization technology therein. Background technique [0002] With the rapid development of information technology, the capacity of data to be stored is increasing rapidly, which makes the scale of the storage system become larger and larger. SAN (Storage Area Network) system is playing an increasingly important role in building large-scale storage systems due to its high scalability, high performance, and ultra-long transmission distance. It can connect various storage devices together to form unified management storage resources, and hosts can access these resources through optical fiber or IP network. SAN system has good performance and high scalability. In this storage architecture, the configuration of resources is constantly changing, and n...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

During this process, a large part of the storage resources allocated to users will be idle for a long time or will not be used at all in the end, and these idle resources cannot be used by other users, resulting in low utilization of storage capacity

Moreover, in order to meet the requirements of system performance and future upgrade and expansion, customers generally purchase disks that exceed the actual data capacity requirements by 3 to 4 times for additional functions such as disk mirroring, which further causes a great waste of storage space resources;

[0007](2) Storage equipment purchase and maintenance costs are high

Since the price per unit capacity of hard drives keeps decreasing over time in accordance with Moore's Law, the storage price will become cheaper and cheaper over time, and the cost of purchasing a large number of storage devices at one time will be very expensive.

Moreover, unused storage resources are always in operation, which greatly wastes costs such as site rent, human maintenance, and energy consumption;

[0008](3) The storage system is not easy to expand

However, since only the metadata saved in the disk can be modified when modifying the metadata, it is difficult to directly modify the metadata that has been loaded into the memory during operation. Therefore, after modifying the metadata, it is often necessary to remount the file system to take effect

Moreover, the entire expansion process requires manual intervention by the administrator, and the storage space cannot be dynamically adjusted according to user needs.

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