SAN Drive Selection by Failure Domain and Performance Filtering
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
In storage-area networks (SANs), existing technologies face challenges in efficiently selecting and allocating storage drives to meet the requirements of logical volumes, particularly in terms of native capabilities, available capacities, and dynamic performance, while also considering failure domains, which affects network latency and logical volume performance.
Innovation Solution
A SAN manager groups storage drives by failure domains and filters them based on native capabilities, available capacities, and dynamic performance to select a set of drives that can provision drive volumes for a logical volume, ensuring the selected drives meet the requested specifications and redundancy needs.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If storage drives are selected without considering failure domains, then the allocation process is simpler and faster, but the reliability and redundancy of the logical volume decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments storage drives into different failure domains based on their physical locations and shared failure risks. This segmentation allows the selection process to consider redundancy requirements by choosing drives from different failure domains, thereby improving logical volume reliability without requiring complete reevaluation of all drives for each selection.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary grouping of storage drives into failure domains before the actual drive selection process. This preliminary action organizes drives in a way that facilitates efficient selection while ensuring reliability requirements are met, reducing the complexity of the main selection process.
2Productivity
If storage drives are filtered by native capabilities, available capacities, and dynamic performance, then the performance of logical volumes is improved, but the time and computational resources required for drive selection increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary filtering of storage drives based on native capabilities, available capacities, and dynamic performance metrics before the actual selection process. This preliminary filtering reduces the pool of candidate drives, making the subsequent selection process faster and more efficient while still ensuring high logical volume performance.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies different filtering criteria and thresholds to different storage drives based on their specific characteristics and the requirements of the logical volume. This allows for optimized performance by selecting drives that locally satisfy the performance requirements without unnecessarily evaluating all drives against all criteria.
3Manufacturing precision
If a comprehensive selection process considering all drive characteristics is used, then the allocation accuracy is improved, but the device complexity and processing overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The comprehensive selection process is segmented into multiple stages: preliminary filtering by basic characteristics, grouping by failure domains, and final selection based on performance metrics. This segmentation maintains high allocation accuracy by considering all relevant characteristics while reducing the complexity of any single selection step.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary filtering and grouping actions before the final drive selection. These preliminary actions organize the data and narrow down the candidate pool, allowing the final selection to focus on the most critical criteria and achieve high accuracy without processing the entire dataset in detail.
Data Source
AI summary
A storage-area network (SAN) manager running on a computing device connected to a fabric receives a request to allocate and mount a logical volume on a client computing device connected to the fabric. The manager groups storage drives connected to the fabric by failure domains. The manager filters the storage drives by native capabilities, available capacities, and dynamic performance to remove from consideration any storage drive having insufficient native capabilities, an insufficient available capacity, and/or an insufficient dynamic performance to satisfy the request. The manager selects a set of storage drives on which to store data of the logical volume, from the remaining storage drives, taking into account the failure domains. The manager sends a command to each such storage drive to provision a drive volume, and a command to a software agent on the client device to create and mount the logical volume using these drive volumes.