140 results about "Thin provisioning" patented technology

A system for de-duplicating data includes providing a first volume including at least one pointer to a second volume that corresponds to physical storage space, wherein the first volume is a logical volume. A first set of data is detected as a duplicate of a second set of data stored on the second volume at a first data chunk. A pointer of the first volume associated with the first set of data is modified to point to the first data chunk. After modifying the pointer, no additional physical storage space is allocated for the first set of data.

Embodiments of the invention include first storage mediums having first storage characteristics for making up a first pool of capacity of a first tier of storage, and second storage mediums having second storage characteristics for making up a second pool of capacity of a second tier of storage. Free capacity of the first and second pools is shared between the first and second tiers of storage. When the first pool has an amount of free capacity available over a reserved amount of free capacity reserved for first tier data, a first quantity of second tier data is moved from the second tier to the first tier. In exemplary embodiments of the invention, the first and second storage mediums are contained within one or more thin provisioning storage systems, and data is moved between the first and second tiers by allocating thin provisioning chunks to the data being moved.

A container file system is built on a sparse metavolume for enhanced decoupling of logical storage from physical storage and for providing common supplementary storage services for iSCSI block access and for NFS or CIFS file system access. The container file system contains a production file system or iSCSI LUN and may also contain snapshot copies of the production file system or iSCSI LUN. The container file system manages storage space among the production file system or iSCSI LUN and its snapshot copies, and also improves fault containment. The sparse metavolume provides thin provisioning of the container file system. A slice map indicates whether or not each slice of logical storage in the sparse metavolume is provisioned with an associated configured slice of data storage.

A system for managing data includes providing at least one logical device having a table of information that maps sections of the logical device to sections of at least two storage areas. Characteristics of data associated with at least one section of the logical device may be evaluated. The at least one section of the data may moved between the at least two storage areas according to a policy and based on the characteristics of the data. The table of information is updated according to the movement of data between the at least two storage areas.

A data storage system and method for simultaneously providing thin provisioning and high availability. The system includes external storage volume and two storage subsystems coupled together and to external storage volume. Each of storage subsystems includes disk drives and a cache area, each of the storage subsystems includes at least one virtual volume and at least one capacity pool. The virtual volume is allocated from storage elements of the at least one capacity pool. The capacity pool includes the disk drives and at least a portion of external storage volume. The storage elements of the capacity pool are allocated to the virtual volume in response to a data access request. The system further includes a host computer coupled to the storage subsystems and configured to switch input/output path between the storage subsystems. Each of the storage subsystems is adapted to copy received write I/O request to other storage subsystems. Upon receipt of request from another storage subsystem, storage element of the capacity pool of storage subsystem is prevented from being allocated to the virtual volume of that storage subsystem.

A memory management system for a thinly provisioned memory volume in which a relatively larger virtual address range of virtual address blocks is mapped to a relatively smaller physical memory comprising physical memory blocks via a mapping table containing entries only for addresses of the physical memory blocks containing data. The memory management system comprises a snapshot provision unit to take a given snapshot of the memory volume at a given time, the snapshot comprising a mapping table and memory values of the volume, the mapping table and memory values comprising entries only for addresses of the physical memory containing data. The snapshot is managed on the same thin provisioning basis as the volume itself, and the system is particularly suitable for RAM type memory disks.

A NAS (network attached storage) controller managing file system data is configured for use in a storage system having thin provisioning capability. Physical storage capacity is used efficiently by making it possible for the NAS controller to identify to a disk array system having thin provisioning capability which segments of a thin provisioned volume are no longer in use. File system blocks or block groups no longer in use by the NAS controller are identified by the NAS controller. The NAS controller sends a release request to the disk array system specifying thin provisioning segments that correspond to the identified FS blocks or block groups. The release request instructs the disk array system to release chunks of physical storage capacity assigned to the specified thin provisioning segments so that the physical storage capacity can be made available for reuse in the disk array storage system.

A method, system, apparatus, and computer-readable medium are provided for improving storage in a disk array are provided. According to aspects of the invention, a redundant disk array is combined with a mechanism for thin provisioning of the array. Thin provisioning refers to a process of allocating physical capacity to logical volumes on an as-needed basis. Data structures containing a mapping between the logical location of stored data and its actual location on a physical device are maintained. Through the use of the thin provisioning mechanism, physical storage space can be allocated sequentially, regardless of the order of logical writes. In this manner, the data stored on the array grows in a linear manner. The data structures maintained by the thin provisioning mechanism can be used to identify the portions of a device or an array that have been previously written. This information allows redundant arrays, such as RAID arrays, to perform initialization, rebuild, and data migration operations only on portions that been written, and not on areas that have not been utilized by a higher layer.

The storage of single or multiple references of the same data block in a storage pool is disclosed. Indexing of the data includes storing reference information in the storage pool as a mapping table. The mapping table indexes each data block in the storage pool. On any read or write request mapping information is used to retrieve the corresponding data block in storage pool.

Physical storage space in a storage system is not allocated to a segment of a targeted volume until the segment of the volume is first targeted for storing write data. When write data is received, the storage system determines whether the targeted volume is designated for storing a first data type that is accessed frequently by I/O operations or designated for storing a second data type that is accessed less frequently than the first data type. Physical storage space for storing the write data is allocated from a first logical partition of the physical storage designated for storing the first data type when the targeted volume is of the first data type and from a second logical partition of the physical storage designated for storing the second data type when the targeted volume is of the second data type. Allocation of frequently accessed data is controlled and performance bottlenecking avoided.

A method for providing storage volumes, which are to be converted to thin provisioned volumes, comprises receiving from a host computer a read/write request identifying a target storage volume among the storage volumes and a target area of access; processing the read/write request and updating an access information of the target storage volume; if the target storage volume does not have access information, generating access information for the converted thin provisioned volume from initial values; and if the target storage volume has access information, generating access information for the converted thin provisioned volume based on the access information of the target storage volume.

The invention discloses a block device thin-provisioning method for log mapping. The method comprises the step of hard disk data distribution, wherein storage resources are formatted, and resource pooling management is carried out on hard disk data distribution so as to support thin-provisioning resource allocation and storage and management of log mapping information, the step of thin-provisioning resource management, wherein on the basis of a hard disk with pooled resources, the data are sequentially written into a next free resource of the hard disk in a writing on-demand allocation mode of the storage resources, and mapping information corresponding to write operation is generated; the step of mapping information logging, wherein logging storage is carried out on the mapping information of the write operation according to an additional allocation mode, and on the basis of an asynchronous updating mode, the mapping information is amended so as to achieve data writing of the multi-user and multi-virtual-volume concurrence sequence.

A method for data storage, including configuring in a data storage system a volume storage pool as data storage resources available for allocation of volumes in the data storage system. The method also includes defining a threshold value for the volume storage pool. When the allocation of the volumes causes the threshold value to be crossed, the method includes performing an action for managing the volume storage pool.

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.

Example implementations described herein are directed to non-disruptive I/O storage migration between different storage types. In example implementations, virtual volume migration techniques such as snapshot, thin-provisioning, tier-provisioning, de-duplicated virtual volume, and so forth, are conducted between different storage types by using pool address re-mapping. In example implementations, asynchronous remote copy volume migration is performed without the initial secondary volume copy.

A method, medium and apparatus for managing storage in a thin-provisioning storage device. The method includes ceasing to use storage on thinly provisioned storage delivered by a thin-provisioning storage device and notifying the thin-provisioning storage device of the unused storage. The method may further include reclaiming the unused storage in response to the notification. Alternatively, the notification may include recognizing the storage being freed and communicating the recognition to the storage device. In another form, the invention is a method, medium and apparatus for managing storage in a thin-provisioning storage device. This method includes delivering thinly provisioned storage and receiving notification that part of the thinly provisioned storage is no longer in use. The method may further include reclaiming that part of the thinly provisioned storage in response to the notification. Between receiving and reclaiming, the method may wait for a time to pass.

In one embodiment, a method of operating block-based thin provisioning disk volumes in a system including a first storage system which is connected via a network to a second storage system comprises, in response to a volume creation request to create a thin provisioning disk volume in the first storage system, recording in the first storage system attribute information of the block-based thin provisioning disk volume; specifying a directory path for the block-based thin provisioning disk volume in a file system in the second storage system; and creating a directory for the block-based thin provisioning disk volume under the specified directory path.