Snapshot Compliance Verification via Timeline Intersection
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Solution Overview
Problem
In computing systems, especially in cloud environments, determining storage system compliance with snapshot policies is challenging due to dynamic changes in snapshot policies and the lack of physical control over cloud storage resources, leading to potential data loss or excessive storage costs.
Innovation Solution
A method and apparatus that maintain snapshot policy event logs and storage group event logs to create timelines, intersect them to calculate the required snapshots, and compare them with actual snapshots stored, ensuring compliance by tracking changes and retention periods.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If snapshot policies are dynamically changed in cloud environments, then storage system adaptability is improved, but compliance monitoring accuracy deteriorates due to lack of physical control
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by maintaining event logs that record all snapshot policy changes and storage group changes before compliance verification occurs. These logs capture timestamps and details of policy modifications, enabling accurate reconstruction of the storage system state at any point in time, thus ensuring compliance monitoring accuracy even in dynamic cloud environments
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces event logs as an intermediary mechanism between snapshot policies and compliance verification. The logs serve as a mediator that records all changes and provides a traceable history, allowing the compliance verification process to accurately track policy changes without requiring direct physical control of cloud storage resources
2Reliability
If comprehensive snapshot compliance verification is performed, then data protection reliability is improved, but computational complexity increases due to timeline intersection calculations
Solution Approach 1:
The compliance verification process is segmented into distinct chronological intervals based on policy change timestamps. By dividing the verification into discrete time segments where policies remain constant, the system can apply consistent verification rules to each segment independently, reducing overall computational complexity while maintaining comprehensive reliability
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-processing event logs to extract and organize policy change timestamps, storage group changes, and snapshot information before the actual compliance verification. This pre-processing creates structured data that simplifies the subsequent timeline intersection calculations and reduces computational burden during verification
Data Source
AI summary
Snapshot policy event logs are maintained containing timestamps associated with changes to the snapshot policy over time. Storage group event logs are maintained for each storage group associated with the snapshot policy containing timestamps associated with changes to the storage group over time. Snapshot compliance is calculated by creating a timeline of the snapshot policy and creating timelines for each of the storage groups associated with the snapshot policy. The snapshot policy timeline and storage group timelines are intersected to calculate how many snapshots should have been created for each storage group associated with the snapshot policy during each snapshot policy timeline interval. The sum of all snapshots that should have been created and still be maintained at a particular point in time is compared with an actual number of snapshots maintained for the storage groups by the storage system at that point in time.