Centralized Multi-Cloud Workload Protection with Platform-Agnostic File Browse
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current systems for managing and restoring virtual machines on cloud servers lack a centralized, platform-agnostic solution for snapshot management, data deduplication, and disaster recovery across multiple cloud servers and local data centers, leading to inefficiencies in data storage and recovery processes.
Innovation Solution
A workload management system that periodically instantiates indexing virtual machines on cloud servers to compile metadata from snapshots, allowing for centralized management and retrieval of virtual machine data across multiple cloud servers and local data centers, enabling efficient data deduplication and improved disaster recovery capabilities.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If virtual machines are backed up by physical resources of hosting cloud servers without centralized management, then each cloud server can independently manage its snapshots, but there is no platform-agnostic solution for cross-cloud data deduplication and disaster recovery
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a centralized workload management system that acts as an intermediary between multiple cloud servers and local data centers. This management system provides platform-agnostic snapshot management capabilities, enabling unified control and coordination across different cloud platforms without requiring changes to the underlying cloud infrastructure. The intermediary handles metadata compilation, deduplication coordination, and recovery orchestration across clouds.
Solution Approach 2:
The workload management system is designed with universal functionality that works across multiple cloud platforms and local data centers. It provides a single unified interface for snapshot management, data deduplication, and disaster recovery operations that is independent of the underlying cloud provider, making the system adaptable to various cloud environments while maintaining consistent management capabilities.
2Quantity of substance
If snapshots are stored without deduplication, then retrieval is simple, but storage space is wasted due to duplicate data blocks
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by compiling metadata and identifying duplicate data blocks across snapshots before actual storage operations. The workload management system analyzes snapshot contents, detects redundant data, and prepares deduplication mappings in advance, enabling efficient storage space utilization without compromising retrieval performance.
3Reliability
If disaster recovery requires changing IP addresses during virtual machine restoration, then data can be restored from snapshots, but service continuity is interrupted
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary configuration of network parameters and IP address mappings during the snapshot creation and storage phase. By pre-establishing the relationship between virtual machine identifiers and IP addresses in the metadata, the system enables restoration operations to maintain the same IP addresses without requiring complex real-time network reconfiguration, thus ensuring service continuity.
4Productivity
If centralized metadata compilation is performed across multiple clouds, then data can be found efficiently, but indexing and retrieval complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the metadata compilation and indexing process into distributed operations performed by individual cloud servers, with a centralized workload management system that aggregates and coordinates the results. Each cloud server independently compiles metadata for its local snapshots, and the management system combines these metadata sets, enabling efficient parallel processing while maintaining centralized control over the overall indexing operation.
Data Source
AI summary
The disclosed technology teaches finding contents of one or more virtual machines running on one or more cloud servers. The disclosed technology includes a cloud snapshot metadata manager periodically instantiating indexing virtual machines on the cloud servers. The indexing virtual machines compile metadata of one or more virtual machines on the cloud server from one or more snapshot file systems of the virtual machines. The indexing virtual machines then transmit the compiled metadata to the cloud snapshot metadata manager. The cloud snapshot metadata manager forwards the metadata to a client and causing the client to create an index of the compiled metadata from multiple virtual machine snapshots on multiple clouds and responding to queries from a user using the index of compiled metadata, without requiring the user to instantiate or to attach to the snapshots.