Atomic Storage Coordination via Completion Sequence Indicators
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current storage systems face challenges in implementing atomic storage operations across multiple storage devices, particularly in ensuring consistency and recovery from invalid shutdowns, due to complexities in managing distributed storage and maintaining data integrity across disparate address spaces.
Innovation Solution
The method involves assigning completion sequence indicators to atomic storage requests, generating sub-requests for multiple storage modules, and using completion tags to determine successful operations, with a recovery agent identifying and informing modules about incomplete requests, thereby ensuring data integrity and recovery.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If atomic storage operations are implemented across multiple storage devices, then data consistency is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a controller as an intermediary component that manages atomic storage operations across multiple storage devices. The controller assigns completion sequence indicators to sub-requests, coordinates the operations, and ensures data consistency by verifying completion sequences, thereby reducing the complexity burden on individual storage devices while maintaining reliability across the distributed system.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the atomic storage operation into multiple sub-requests distributed across different storage devices. Each storage device handles independent sub-requests with assigned completion sequence indicators, allowing parallel processing while maintaining overall atomicity. This segmentation reduces the complexity of managing atomic operations across the entire system by distributing the workload.
2Reliability
If completion sequence indicators are assigned to manage atomic operations, then data integrity is improved, but operation overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by assigning completion sequence indicators to sub-requests before the storage operations are executed. This pre-assignment of sequence indicators ensures that the order of completion can be verified without requiring complex coordination during the actual storage operations, thereby maintaining data integrity while minimizing operation overhead during execution.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements feedback mechanisms where storage devices report their completion status with the assigned sequence indicators back to the controller. The controller verifies the completion sequences to ensure atomicity was maintained. This feedback loop provides a simple verification mechanism that ensures data integrity without requiring complex real-time coordination during the storage operations.
3Quantity of substance
If sub-requests are distributed to multiple storage modules, then storage capacity is improved, but coordination difficulty increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal completion sequence indicator mechanism that can be applied to any number of storage modules. The same basic approach of assigning and verifying sequence indicators works regardless of how many storage devices are involved, making the coordination mechanism scalable and reducing the complexity of managing different coordination strategies for different system sizes.
4Measurement precision
If completion tags are used to verify operations, then operation accuracy is improved, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by pre-assigning completion sequence indicators to sub-requests before execution. This allows for accurate verification of operation completion order without requiring complex post-processing analysis, thereby maintaining operation accuracy while minimizing the time penalty for verification.
Data Source
AI summary
An aggregation module combines a plurality of logical address spaces to form a conglomerated address space. The logical address spaces comprising the conglomerated address space may correspond to different respective storage modules and/or storage devices. An atomic aggregation module coordinates atomic storage operations within the conglomerated address space, and which span multiple storage modules. The aggregation module may identify the storage modules used to implement the atomic storage request, assign a sequence indicator to the atomic storage request, and issue atomic storage requests (sub-requests) to the storage modules. The storage modules may be configured to store a completion tag comprising the sequence indicator upon completing the sub-requests issued thereto. The aggregation module may identify incomplete atomic storage requests based on the completion information stored on the storage modules.