Methods and apparatus for pass-through data block movement with virtual storage appliances

Abstract

A virtual storage appliance (VSA), acting as a target tape library emulating multiple tape drives. The overhead in processing the data within the VSA and the command blocks can be reduced by utilizing in-memory buffers as a pass-through to a storage media such as a target tape library. The VSA may function as a target device relative to a network server for use as a backup tape library. Furthermore, the VSA may include interface (which can be any interconnect interface like SCSI or FC) and buffers in the memory along with the command blocks which points to these buffers. The data that comes in from an initiator server is written onto a disk storage system. However, the same data buffers that are in the memory in the VSA can also be used to spool the data onto the tape library to eliminate further disk and file system overhead. The same in-memory buffer can now be used by the VSA that will act as an initiator to write to the target tape library. Further, the file system on the disk storage subsystem in the VSA can be a sequential file system to reduce the overhead caused due to randomness and block allocation methods of a traditional file system.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.