US 7,631,155 B1Granted

Thin provisioning of a file system and an iSCSI LUN through a common mechanism

AssigneeEMC Corporation

InventorsJean-Pierre Bono, John M. Hayden, Sairam Veeraswamy, Uresh K. Vahalia, Morgan A. Clark, Sachin Mullick, Saurabh Godbole

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Abstract

A container file system is built on a sparse metavolume for enhanced decoupling of logical storage from physical storage and for providing common supplementary storage services for iSCSI block access and for NFS or CIFS file system access. The container file system contains a production file system or iSCSI LUN and may also contain snapshot copies of the production file system or iSCSI LUN. The container file system manages storage space among the production file system or iSCSI LUN and its snapshot copies, and also improves fault containment. The sparse metavolume provides thin provisioning of the container file system. A slice map indicates whether or not each slice of logical storage in the sparse metavolume is provisioned with an associated configured slice of data storage.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A file server comprising:

data storage containing data of a production file system or a logical unit number (LUN) of storage;
and
at least one data processor coupled to the data storage for accessing the data storage;
wherein the production file system or LUN is contained in a file of a container file system in the data storage, the container file system having a logical extent of storage provided by a logical extent of a sparse metavolume of the data storage, the logical extent of the sparse metavolume including slices of logical storage, at least one of the slices of logical storage being provisioned with a configured slice of the data storage containing data of the production file system or LUN;
wherein said at least one data processor is programmed for maintaining a slice map, the slice map indicating whether or not each slice of logical storage in the sparse metavolume is provisioned with an associated configured slice of the data storage;
and
said at least one data processor is programmed for responding to requests from at least one client for writing data to and reading data from the production file system or LUN by accessing the slice map for determining a configured slice of the data storage to be written to and read from, and by writing to and reading from the configured slice of the data storage to be written to and read from.

4 more elements

A method of operating a file server, said method comprising the steps of:

configuring data storage into slices of the data storage;
and
building a container file system upon a sparse metavolume of the data storage, the sparse metavolume including slices of logical storage, at least one of the slices of logical storage being provisioned with one of the configured slices of the data storage, and creating a production file system or a logical unit number (LUN) of the data storage in a file of the container file system;
and
maintaining a slice map, the slice map indicating whether or not each slice of logical storage in the sparse metavolume is provisioned with an associated one of the configured slices of the data storage;
and
responding to requests from said at least one client for writing data to and reading data from the production file system or LUN by accessing the slice map for determining a configured slice of the data storage to be written to and read from, and by writing to and reading from the configured slice of data storage to be written to and read from.

4 more elements

A method of operating a file server, the file server having data storage containing data of a production file system or a logical unit number (LUN) of storage, wherein the production file system or LUN is contained in a file of a container file system in the data storage, the container file system having a logical extent of storage provided by a logical extent of a sparse metavolume of the data storage, the logical extent of the sparse metavolume including slices of logical storage, at least one of the slices of logical storage being provisioned with at least one configured slice of the data storage containing data of the production file system or LUN, said method comprising the steps of:

maintaining a slice map, the slice map indicating whether or not each slice of logical storage in the sparse metavolume is provisioned with an associated configured slice of the data storage;
and
responding to requests from at least one client for writing data to and reading data from the production file system or LUN by accessing the slice map for determining a configured slice of the data storage to be written to and read from, and by writing to and reading from the configured slice of the data storage to be written to and read from.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Facts

Application: 11/772,129Filed 30 Jun 2007
Granted: 8 Dec 2009
Term ends: Not estimatedThe source records don’t support an estimate.

Classification13 codes

G06F 3/0665
Virtualisation aspects: at area level, e.g. provisioning of virtual or logical volumes
G06F 3/0608
Specifically adapted to achieve a particular effect: saving storage space on storage systems
G06F 3/067
Adopting a particular infrastructure: distributed or networked storage systems, e.g. storage area networks [SAN], network attached storage [NAS]
G06F 11/1004
Adding special bits or symbols to the coded information, e.g. parity check, casting out 9's or 11's: to protect a block of data words, e.g. CRC or…