Tray-Based Storage Organization in Automated Data Systems
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current network computing and storage systems face challenges in optimizing data performance and integrity, particularly in efficiently storing and retrieving large quantities of data while ensuring durability and availability, especially when dealing with failures and data loss.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of redundancy coding techniques, such as erasure codes, to distribute data across multiple volumes, along with the use of mobile drive units and inventory holders for physical storage and retrieval, allows for efficient storage, organization, and retrieval of data, even in the presence of failures, by generating redundancy coded shards and using failure-decorrelated subsets to ensure data durability and availability.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If data is distributed across multiple volumes using redundancy coding, then data durability and availability are improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides data into multiple shards distributed across different volumes and inventory holders. Each shard is a separate unit that can be independently stored, managed, and retrieved. This segmentation enables redundancy coding to be applied effectively while maintaining manageable system complexity through modular organization of data storage units.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces mobile drive units as intermediaries that physically transport inventory holders between storage locations and data stations. This intermediary mechanism abstracts the complexity of physical data movement from the logical data management system, allowing redundancy coding to operate on logical shards while the physical infrastructure handles the complexity of distributed storage through standardized transport operations.
2Reliability
If data is distributed across multiple volumes using redundancy coding, then data availability is improved, but retrieval complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent pre-organizes shards into failure-decorrelated subsets and assigns them to different inventory holders before any failure occurs. This preliminary organization ensures that if a failure happens, the system can immediately retrieve data from the remaining subsets without complex real-time decision-making about which volumes to access. The mobile drive units are also pre-configured to navigate to specific inventory holders, enabling straightforward retrieval operations.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements dynamic shard assignment where the system can adaptively distribute shards across different inventory holders based on current system state and failure patterns. This dynamic approach allows the retrieval process to be simplified by always maintaining an optimal distribution where any minimum quorum of shards can reconstruct the original data, regardless of which specific volumes fail.
3Reliability
If minimum quorum of shards is used for data reconstruction, then data integrity is improved, but storage efficiency decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the parameter of shard distribution by organizing shards into failure-decorrelated subsets with specific cardinality requirements. Instead of uniform distribution, the system adjusts the parameters of how shards are grouped and assigned to inventory holders, ensuring that the minimum quorum can be achieved from any valid subset. This parameter optimization allows the system to use the smallest necessary number of redundant shards to guarantee data integrity, improving storage efficiency while maintaining reliability.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques and systems for storing and retrieving data storage devices of a data storage system are disclosed. In some embodiments, inventory holders are used to store data storage devices used by a data storage system. When data is to be transacted with the data storage devices, mobile drive units locate appropriate inventory holders and transport them to a device reading station, where an appropriate device retrieval unit transacts the data. In some embodiments, each inventory holder includes a plurality of trays that are independently accessible to the device retrieval unit. After the data has been transacted, the data storage devices are returned to the appropriate inventory holders, and the inventory holders are placed by the mobile drive units in locations where they may be accessed in response to further data transactions.