Controller fail-over without device bring-up
AssigneeMTI Technology Corporation
InventorsDon Sawdy, Arthur L. Rogers
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method and apparatus for reducing the bring-up time upon a transfer of control. This is accomplished by performing the physical level access bring-up prior to fail-over or other transfer, on the devices which are only secondarily controlled by the controller. The media level access is performed only by the controller with primary control of the devices. Upon a failure or transfer by the first controller, a media level access can be immediately performed by the second controller without doing a physical level access first, since this had been done prior to the fail-over or transfer.
Claims7
In a mass storage system having first and second mass storage controllers, both connected to a plurality of disk drives, the method comprising:
- performing a physical level access initialization of each of said plurality of disk drives by said first controller;
- performing a physical level access initialization of each of said plurality of disk drives by said second controller;
- performing a media level access initialization of each of said plurality of disk drives by said first controller;
- and
- upon a failure of said first controller, performing a media level access initialization of each of said plurality of disk drives by said second controller, without doing a physical level access initialization after said failure of said first controller.
A method of transferring control among controllers in a storage system, the method comprising the steps of:
- coupling a primary controller to a plurality of disk drives;
- coupling a secondary controller to the plurality of disk drives;
- bringing-up the primary and secondary controllers to a physical level access state;
- bringing-up the primary controller to a media level access state;
- and
- upon a transfer of control from the primary controller to the secondary controller, bringing-up the secondary controller to the media access level state, without having to first bring-up to the physical level access state.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.