System and method for managing usage quotas

Abstract

A system for managing computer resource usage quotas includes a distributed gateway service, a plurality of clients, an internal network, a distributed storage service a system management service, a configuration database, and a distributed metadata service. A method for managing computer resource usage quotas applied to a plurality of users of data includes the steps of defining one or more resource classes, defining at least one usage policy for the resource classes, tracking quota usage for the usage quotas in accordance with the usage policy, and enforcing quota usage for the usage quotas, and storing the data in accord with the resource class definitions. Optionally, the quota usage may be aggregated.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] The present application is related to commonly owned, co-pending U.S. application Ser. No. 09 / 709,187 entitled “Scalable Storage System” by David Raccah et al., filed Nov. 10, 2000; U.S. application Ser. No. 09 / 731,418, entitled “Symmetric Shared Storage System,” by Olaf Manczak et al., filed Dec. 5, 2000; and U.S. application Ser. No. 09 / 664,677, entitled “File Storage System Having Separation of Components,” by George Feinberg et al., filed Sep. 19, 2000; each commonly owned by the present assignee, the contents of each being incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] The present invention relates generally to computing systems, and more particularly to a method and system that define, track, and enforce resource usage quotas based on classes. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] Computer network technology has improved the exchange of and access to information. As a result, computer use has become ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0008] Accordingly, it is an advantage of the present invention to provide a quota management system that allows the use of classes to provide highly customizable and easy to use resource usage management.

[0009] Another advantage of the present invention is to provide a quota management system in variety of process models such as but not limited to, a single process, multiple processes, or as distributed processes on multiple machines.

[0010] A further advantage of the present invention is to provide a highly scalable quota management system that can easily be scaled to provide for the expanding needs of customers.

[0011] Another advantage of the invention is to provide a quota management system for allowing the definition of classes that are stored in a configuration database and can be used for resource management.

[0012] Another advantage of the present invention is to provide a quota management system for allowing a tracking mechanism that monitors usage quotas.

[0013] Another advantage of the invention is to provide quota usage tracking for gathering quota usage information for a partition of a file system.

Problems solved by technology

The increased demand for storage presents several challenges to providing a tracking and enforcement system that manages resource usage.

Although these conventional storage quota management methods are useful in some respects, they fail in others.

However the cost of resources in a distributed computing system and more particularly a distributed scalable storage system is also influenced by a multitude of other factors.

Therefore, traditional storage quota management methods fail to adequately define, track, and enforce usage quotas and appropriately allocate their respective costs.

Moreover, a specific cost for storing a file can be associated with each storage class.

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