Heterogeneous Storage Disaster Rollback via Data Format Conversion
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Solution Overview
Problem
Legacy disaster recovery techniques fail to efficiently perform failover and failback operations across heterogeneous distributed storage systems due to incompatibilities between different vendor systems, leading to inefficient resource usage and increased costs.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a data manager service in a source distributed storage system to facilitate disaster recovery operations using a target system with a different vendor, managing hypervisor-based snapshots and deltas, and converting data formats to enable seamless failover and failback across heterogeneous environments.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If legacy DR techniques are used for heterogeneous storage systems, then data can be transported between clusters, but the snapshots and deltas conform to different incompatible formats requiring full data restoration
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the fundamental parameter of data format compatibility by implementing a universal data format that can be understood by both source and target storage systems. This allows incremental updates to be applied across heterogeneous systems without requiring full data restoration, thereby improving disaster recovery efficiency while maintaining reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a data manager service as an intermediary component that handles format conversion and coordination between source and target storage systems. This mediator enables seamless data transport and application of incremental updates across heterogeneous formats, eliminating the need for full restoration operations.
2Manufacturing precision
If specialized drivers are implemented for each operating system to manage delta storage, then storage management is precise, but management becomes difficult across thousands of VMs
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal data manager service that can manage delta storage across multiple operating systems and virtual machine types through a single standardized interface. This multi-functional approach maintains precise storage management capability while dramatically reducing operational complexity compared to system-specific drivers.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent uses virtual machine snapshots and incremental delta copies to represent storage states rather than requiring specialized drivers for each OS. This copying approach allows precise storage management through data-level operations that are independent of the underlying operating system, simplifying management across thousands of VMs.
3Ease of operation
If the same hypervisor modules are mandated on both source and target systems, then disaster recovery is simplified, but deployment cost and maintenance complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the requirement from identical hypervisor modules to compatible hypervisor environments by using a standardized data format and universal data manager service. This allows disaster recovery operations to proceed with different hypervisor configurations on source and target systems while maintaining operational simplicity through the abstraction layer provided by the data manager.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems for storage system rollover and rollback. A data mover agent is installed on a source storage system to capture disaster recovery data and send to a target system. Upon receiving a rollover event signal, a virtualized controller creates one or more replica user virtual machines running on the target system that serve to replicate functions of the user virtual machines from the source storage system. The virtualized controller on the target system converts the target disaster recovery data from a first format to a second format to facilitate use of the target disaster recovery data by the replica user virtual machines. Rollback is initiated when the target system receives a rollback event signal. Differences in the data that have occurred between the rollover event and the rollback signal are calculated and sent to the rollback system. The calculated differences are applied to a registered snapshot on the rollback system.