Patent Application
20090077338
The present invention relates to a technology for improved management of storage systems, and more particularly to a technology for managing storage systems having storage virtualization appliances.
The demand for greater capacity, a multitude of different host types and the need to manage storage non-disruptively with respect to the host applications means that the scheduling and managing of storage system maintenance becomes very complex and expensive. In order to reduce the complexity of the storage system it may become desirable to merge storage resources. The storage administrator may wish to reduce the number of storage appliances that need to be managed. This may be because either the current appliances can be upgraded to cope with more resources or a new appliance may be available that can manage a greater portion of the current storage resources. The administrator's task therefore is to consolidate different storage resources while minimizing the impact on the user (i.e. host applications). It will be clear to one of ordinary skill in the art that the same, or similar, disadvantages apply to other administrative and system management actions, but for ease of understanding the present description will be confined to the situation described above.
There are a number of ways this could be achieved according to the prior art. For example: the system could be taken down on appliances (104) and (120) and rebuilt on appliance (105), but this obviously means disrupting all the host applications; or the volumes on appliances (104) and (120) could be mirrored onto appliance (105), but this requires additional storage being made available in order to maintain two copies of the volumes.
It would thus be desirable to have an improved technology for managing storage systems having storage virtualization appliances.
The present invention accordingly provides, an apparatus, system, and article form managing storage systems having two or more appliances.
In one aspect, an apparatus is provided for controlling a configuration change in a storage system having a plurality of storage appliances. An I/O handler and a local volume mapper are provided local to each storage appliance. The I/O handler transmits and receives I/O requests, and the local volume mapper maps storage local to the respective storage appliance. A remote volume mapper is provided local to each storage appliance for mapping storage remote from the respective storage appliance. In addition, a spanning host interface layer is provided local to each storage appliance to respond to detection of a configuration change by receiving and redirecting I/O requests among said plurality of storage appliances.
In another aspect, a method is provided for controlling a configuration change in a storage system having a plurality of storage appliances. I/O requests are transmitted and received by an I/O handler local to each storage appliance. A local volume mapper is provided for mapping storage local each storage appliance. Similarly, a remote volume mapper is provided at each storage appliance for mapping storage remote from the local storage appliance. In response to detection of the configuration change, I/O requests are received and redirected among the storage appliances by a spanning host interface layer.
In yet another aspect of the invention, an article is provided with a computer data carrier having computer program instructions configured to manage a configuration change in a storage system. Instructions are provided to transmit and receive I/O requests by an I/O handler at each storage appliance. In addition, instructions are provided to map storage local to the storage appliance. A local volume mapper at each storage appliance is employed to map local storage. Instructions are also provided to map storage remote from the storage appliance. A remote volume mapper at each storage appliance may the remote storage. In response to detection of a configuration change, instructions are provided to receive and redirect I/O requests among the plurality of storage appliances by a spanning host interface layer.
Embodiments of the present invention, in its broadest aspect, provide apparatus and methods for performing management actions, such as merging storage resources from one storage appliance with another, without loss of access.
A preferred embodiment of the present invention will now be described, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawing figures, in which:
A preferred embodiment of the present invention will now be described, with reference to the figures, beginning at
The storage administrator wishes to merge appliance (104) into appliance (120) in the sense that appliance (120) will present both volumes (102) and (108) without impacting access for hosts (100) and (116). It will be clear to one of ordinary skill in the art that, though the description of the preferred embodiment is cast in terms of the Small Computer System Interface or SCSI protocols, any other set of system interface protocols may be substituted.
The preferred embodiment of the present invention makes use of a spanning host SCSI interface layer (132), as shown in
The two appliances (104) and (120) are merged using the following sequence of operations, with reference to
Turning now to
The process of the preferred embodiment can be repeated for any number of volumes on any number of clusters. The process is independent for each volume and so can be done in parallel.
An exemplary apparatus or arrangement of apparatus according to the preferred embodiment will now be described, with reference to the schematic diagram of
The preferred embodiment of the present invention in the form of an apparatus or arrangement of apparatus thus advantageously addresses the problem of providing a technical means for managing storage systems having storage virtualization appliances. An exemplary method or logic arrangement according to the preferred embodiment will now be described, with reference to the schematic diagram of
The preferred embodiment of the present invention in the form of a method or logic arrangement thus advantageously addresses the problem of providing a technology for managing storage systems having storage virtualization appliances.
It will be clear to one of ordinary skill in the art that all or part of the method of the preferred embodiments of the present invention may suitably and usefully be embodied in a logic apparatus, or a plurality of logic apparatus, comprising logic elements arranged to perform the steps of the method and that such logic elements may comprise hardware components, firmware components or a combination thereof.
It will be equally clear to one of skill in the art that all or part of a logic arrangement according to the preferred embodiments of the present invention may suitably be embodied in a logic apparatus comprising logic elements to perform the steps of the method, and that such logic elements may comprise components such as logic gates in, for example a programmable logic array or application-specific integrated circuit. Such a logic arrangement may further be embodied in enabling elements for temporarily or permanently establishing logic structures in such an array or circuit using, for example, a virtual hardware descriptor language, which may be stored and transmitted using fixed or transmittable carrier media.
It will be appreciated that the method and arrangement described above may also suitably be carried out fully or partially in software running on one or more processors (not shown in the figures), and that the software may be provided in the form of one or more computer program elements carried on any suitable data-carrier (also not shown in the figures) such as a magnetic or optical disk or the like. Channels for the transmission of data may likewise comprise storage media of all descriptions as well as signal-carrying media, such as wired or wireless signal-carrying media.
The present invention may further suitably be embodied as a computer program product for use with a computer system. Such an implementation may comprise a series of computer-readable instructions either fixed on a tangible medium, such as a computer readable medium, for example, diskette, CD-ROM, ROM, or hard disk, or transmittable to a computer system, via a modem or other interface device, over either a tangible medium, including but not limited to optical or analogue communications lines, or intangibly using wireless techniques, including but not limited to microwave, infrared or other transmission techniques. The series of computer readable instructions embodies all or part of the functionality previously described herein.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that such computer readable instructions can be written in a number of programming languages for use with many computer architectures or operating systems. Further, such instructions may be stored using any memory technology, present or future, including but not limited to, semiconductor, magnetic, or optical, or transmitted using any communications technology, present or future, including but not limited to optical, infrared, or microwave. It is contemplated that such a computer program product may be distributed as a removable medium with accompanying printed or electronic documentation, for example, shrink-wrapped software, pre-loaded with a computer system, for example, on a system ROM or fixed disk, or distributed from a server or electronic bulletin board over a network, for example, the Internet or World Wide Web.
In an alternative, the preferred embodiment of the present invention may be realized in the form of a computer implemented method of deploying a service comprising steps of deploying computer program code operable to, when deployed into a computer infrastructure and executed thereon, cause the computer infrastructure to perform all the steps of the method.
In a further alternative, the preferred embodiment of the present invention may be realized in the form of a data carrier having functional data thereon, the functional data comprising functional computer data structures to, when loaded into a computer system and operated upon thereby, enable the computer system to perform all the steps of the method.
It will be clear to one skilled in the art that many improvements and modifications can be made to the foregoing exemplary embodiment without departing from the scope of the present invention.
| Number | Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 07114885.2 | Aug 2007 | EP | regional |
