Asynchronous Data Replication with Metadata Coordination
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Solution Overview
Problem
Companies face challenges in ensuring 24/7 availability of critical applications and data integrity due to unplanned and planned outages, necessitating effective disaster recovery and data protection mechanisms in cloud storage environments.
Innovation Solution
A method for recording data and metadata at specific points-in-time, with policies enforcing recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), and generating data structures with pointers to backup files for asynchronous replication and remote backup, enabling point-in-time consistency and efficient data restoration.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If data is replicated synchronously to ensure data integrity, then data reliability is improved, but system speed and availability deteriorate due to network latency and coordination overhead
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments data protection into two independent components: data replication and metadata replication. Data is replicated asynchronously to improve speed, while metadata is replicated synchronously to maintain data integrity and consistency. This segmentation allows each component to be optimized independently, resolving the contradiction between reliability and speed.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces metadata as an intermediary that coordinates data replication across distributed storage systems. The metadata contains information about data locations, versions, and consistency states, enabling asynchronous data replication while maintaining overall data integrity without requiring synchronous coordination of the actual data transfer.
2Reliability
If synchronous metadata replication is used to maintain consistency, then data reliability is improved, but recovery time objective (RTO) deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent separates metadata replication from data replication, allowing metadata to be replicated synchronously for consistency while data can be restored from pre-synchronized copies. This segmentation enables faster recovery by allowing parallel restoration of metadata and data without sequential dependencies.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs preliminary asynchronous synchronization of data between primary and secondary storage systems before failures occur. This preliminary action ensures that up-to-date data copies are already available, reducing recovery time when failures happen while metadata is being replicated synchronously.
3Speed
If asynchronous data replication is implemented to improve speed, then system availability is improved, but data consistency deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses metadata as an intermediary to track and coordinate asynchronous data replication. The metadata contains version information, timestamps, and consistency markers that allow the system to detect and resolve consistency issues without blocking the fast asynchronous data replication process, thus maintaining both speed and consistency.
4Reliability
If remote hot backup environments are maintained for disaster recovery, then reliability is improved, but resource consumption and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent enables the secondary storage system to serve multiple functions: it acts as a hot backup for disaster recovery, a test environment for software updates, and a development platform. This multi-functionality maximizes the utilization of stored data and resources, reducing the need for dedicated backup resources while maintaining reliability.
Data Source
AI summary
Protecting and restoring data within a networked (e.g. cloud) storage computing environment through asynchronous replication and remote backup of data and its associated metadata. Data backup and recovery functionality provides data backups by detecting incremental updates to the data and its associated metadata at specific points in time determined by policies. The policies are configurable based on user requirements. Multiple copies of the data backups can be made and stored in separate compressed files at backup/disaster recovery locations. The backups of data and its associated metadata, which includes file system configuration information can be used to restore the state of a computer file system to that of a given point-in-time. Accordingly, a data protection approach is disclosed for protecting data at both the file system level and application level.