Resource command messages and methods

Abstract

Resource command messages comprise commands and command urgency or importance information that is interpreted by a resource device and is coupled with information relating to the resource device to determine when to process the command within the resource command message. Resource devices comprising a plurality of resource nodes provide increased performance, responsiveness, and load balancing by multiple resource nodes processing the same resource command message in parallel.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The field of the invention is computing resource command messaging and resource devices.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Resource devices manage computing resources. There are a myriad of examples of such computing resources, extending from data storage on disk drives in storage arrays to connection processing within high volume content servers in server farms. Typically, resource devices comprise a plurality of resource nodes, thereby forming a distributed resource that appears as a single, logical resource device from the perspective of a resource consumer.[0003]The resource nodes responsible for managing the physical resources, whether the resource nodes manage a data storage resource-or is an individual web server responsible for connection and content resources, must function efficiently, especially in complex environments comprising many resource consumers and resource devices. The efficiency depends on desirable characteristics including scalabilit...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0025]The teachings herein may be advantageously employed by developers and producers of computing resources including storage devices, or media content servers to create efficient, scalable systems that deliver high performance and fast response.

Problems solved by technology

Resource nodes are typically either managed by external management systems, or have a management layer imposed on them, which unfortunately introduces extra overhead beyond the core responsibility of resource management.

For example, as resource nodes become loaded, they typically inform resource consumers of their state, shift resource requests to other resource nodes, or perform other out-of-band management communications to maximize performance resulting in excessive out-of-band communication.

Such systems suffer from scalability issues because as new resource nodes are added to the environment, the management “chatter” increases subtend a larger fraction of communication and processing bandwidth, which negatively impacts performance.

Due to such coarse grained scalability, the cost to incrementally enhance the capability of the system increases, and the cost to replicate the entire system becomes prohibitive.

Although the patent describes how the bus between the applications and modules is managed, it requires a bus management system rather than allowing the individual module's and application's behavior to have the desired performance result.

The '470 patent does not address the autonomous behavior of a resource node whose behavior naturally results from the use of urgency or importance information used along with the resource node information to determine when tasks are issued.

None of the related art addresses the need for autonomous resource nodes whose behavior naturally results in desired characteristics including scalability, high performance, load balancing, or responsiveness.

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