System and method for emulating operating system metadata to provide cross-platform access to storage volumes

Abstract

A method and system are provided for emulating operating system metadata to provide cross-platform access to storage volumes. The method may include generating operating system metadata for a storage device, wherein the operating system metadata emulates a storage volume hosted under a first operating system. The method may further include making the operating system metadata available to a host computer system, wherein the host computer system runs the first operating system. The operating system metadata enables the host computer system to recognize the storage device as the storage volume hosted under the first operating system.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] This invention is related to the field of storage management and, more particularly, to the integration of off-host storage virtualization with hosts in a heterogeneous computing environment. [0003] 2. Description of the Related Art [0004] Modern enterprise computing environments are characterized by pressures for continuous availability and growth. These factors are driving the adoption of new approaches to computing and storage. Enterprise computing environments are increasingly using computer clusters, Storage Area Networks (SANs), and other centralized storage mechanisms to simplify storage, improve availability, and handle escalating demands for data and applications. [0005] Clustering may be defined as the use of multiple computers (e.g., PCs or UNIX workstations), multiple storage devices, and redundant interconnections to form what appears to external users as a single and highly available system. Clustering...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0009] A block server enables a computer system to take its storage and “serve” that storage onto a SAN (e.g., as virtual SCSI disks). As used herein, a “block server” comprises a hardware or software entity that provides a collection of linearly addressed blocks of uniform size that can be read or written. A block server may also be referred to herein as a “block device, “block-server appliance,” or “appliance.” The block server and its virtual disks may have many advantages for ease of management and consolidation of storage. For example, a block server may provide the ability to easily allocate and reallocate storage on a SAN: the right amount of storage to the right computer system at the right time. This functionality may be thought of as “repurposing” the storage from the application server perspective. A block server may also provide the ability to consolidate storage behind the SAN (i.e., managing the storage pool). For example, this consolidation can be employed with pre-existing fibre channel or SCSI storage not on a SAN. One could then “repurpose” non-SAN storage and move it into a managed SAN environment.

Problems solved by technology

The disk driver also forms an abstraction barrier that makes it more difficult for applications and file systems to cooperate with the underlying virtualization in advanced ways.

Some UNIX-based operating systems from HP and IBM, however, do not implement simple logical partitioning in their disk drivers; instead, these operating systems include a virtualization layer that defines logical volumes that can subdivide or span disks in more flexible ways.

In the process of presenting the blocks of the block-virtual volumes directly to file systems or block-consuming applications, several problems may be encountered.

First, without a consistent name for a block device, applications and file systems may not know what they are accessing, and the administrator of an environment may not understand the relationship between the device that the file system is using and the virtual volume defined by the block virtualization.

Second, any partitioning or virtualization schemes that are specific to a particular operating system may interfere with cross-platform (e.g., cross-operating-system) access to external storage volumes.

For these reasons and more, offering uniform access to storage devices in a heterogeneous computing environment can be problematic.

Images