Thin provisioning method for storage system

Abstract

The invention provides a thin provisioning method for a storage system. Thin provisioning is generally applied to the storage system, and is used for providing a large-volume virtual driver for an operating system. According to a thin provisioning technology, a volume space which surpasses a practical space can be provided for an upper layer in a virtual way, i.e., the available volume of the operating system is assumed to be larger than the practically provided volume. Data in enterprises increase gradually instead of getting too many at the start, so that the utilization ratio of the storage volume can be increased by adopting thin provisioning. A large-volume virtual driver can be provided for the operating system by adopting a thin provisioning storage scheme. The operating system is provided with a large magnetic disk space during distribution of the magnetic disk space, so that enterprises can consider increasing storage equipment stepwise without adjusting the operating system along with the increase of the enterprise data volume. The hot plug function of the storage equipment is realized, and the storage efficiency and flexibility of magnetic disk equipment can be improved.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to a server storage system, in particular to a method for automatic thin provisioning of a storage system. Background technique [0002] like figure 1 As shown, simply speaking, there may not be so many actual physical storage devices, and the operating system thinks that there is such a large storage space. Therefore, thin provisioning must be able to support dynamic expansion. Before the actual physical storage device space is full, use the dynamic expansion method of thin provisioning to expand the actual storage space, so as to ensure the normal use of the user system. Otherwise, the operating system uses non-existing storage space because it does not know the actual physical capacity, which will cause immeasurable and serious problems. [0003] At present, thin provisioning has been widely used in storage systems of foreign storage manufacturers such as EMC, IBM, HDS, and HP 3PAR, but domestic manufacturers are still weak i...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Other vendors, such as NetApp, HDS, and HP, mostly create storage resource pools from RAID groups in their thin provisioning methods. Users allocate LUNs and volumes as before, but in fact the system is just deceiving the hardware.

As actual disk usage grows, storage administrators must adjust their volume allocations. This thin provisioning can lead to more manual operations and more complicated metadata processing.

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