Patent Application
20130060901
Information Management, sometimes abbreviated as “IM,” helps users and entities capitalize on information or data. Information management helps provide e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and records management, and it also provides for information back up and archiving e-mails, files, and applications. Information management can provide for data protection, which includes information access and quick disaster recovery even as the quantity of information grows and also avoids the loss of information. Information management can also provide for routing or delivery of information or documents from selected sources to selected destination in a network including faxes, printers, e-mail, the World Wide Web, and file destinations.
As information continues to grow and networks and infrastructure continues to get more complex, entities search for efficient and cost effective ways to provide information management services. Two areas of concern include protection of information and routing of information. Protection of information and routing of information have become more complex in that so much of network bandwidth, or the availability of storage devices, are stressed for other business uses. Often, archival and storage inefficiently use network resources or inefficiently store documents. The cost of these inefficiencies includes reduced performance in disaster recovery and creating additional stresses on network resources. Information management administrators often spend considerable time and resources on improving protection and storage. In order to meet business demands, many information management solutions employ additional maintenance costs, overheads, or decentralized processes.
The accompanying drawings are included to provide a further understanding of embodiments and are incorporated in and constitute a part of this specification. The drawings illustrate embodiments and together with the description serve to explain principles of embodiments. Other embodiments and many of the intended advantages of embodiments will be readily appreciated as they become better understood by reference to the following detailed description. The elements of the drawings are not necessarily to scale relative to each other. Like reference numerals designate corresponding similar parts.
In the following Detailed Description, reference is made to the accompanying drawings, which form a part hereof, and in which is shown by way of illustration specific embodiments in which the invention may be practiced. It is to be understood that other embodiments may be utilized and structural or logical changes may be made without departing from the scope of the present invention. The following detailed description, therefore, is not to be taken in a limiting sense, and the scope of the present invention is defined by the appended claims. It is to be understood that features of the various exemplary embodiments described herein may be combined with each other, unless specifically noted otherwise.
As described, one aspect of the method includes a data protection task, such as the planning stage 302 and the optimizing stage 306. Subtasks in the broad data protection task, such as protection and archival features, have relied on administrator-controlled scheduling to perform copying of data. In order to perform the tasks, administrators often take into account many business or system issues, such as network traffic, needs of the application or data being protected, resource availability, and other protection issues in order to arrive at a suitable schedule. In many previous systems, the administrator has been unable to determine the effectiveness of the scheduling or the protection tasks such as to test for availability of resources or alternative storage mechanisms, or the like, at the time of making copies and protecting data. In many available protection schemes, the administrators specifies both the intended resources and the alternatives, and often without information as to effectiveness of such a scheme.
The method 300 is configured to receive protection objectives, such as from an administrator or the like, as an IM Service Level Objective. In one example, the IM Service Level Objectives can be a Protection Service Level Objective (Protection SLO) for each application or data to be protected. The Protection SLOs are received at the planning stage 302 that determines a time schedule for protecting information, e.g., copying or archiving data, as well as a node pool schedule that describes a plurality of suitable nodes for use during the time schedule. The plural of suitable nodes is useful in case a selected node in the node pool is unavailable because of device failure or other reasons.
The method 300 proceeds to the routing stage 304 to execute the schedules developed with the planning stage 302. Many information management applications route large amounts of data from various sources to various destinations. Previous data movement engines have become very specialized. For example, one engine could be used to perform a restore and will attempt to discover a restore chain while a second engine is used to perform a data back up. As information management tasks are added, such as archival document management, appropriate data movement engines are used or added thus increasing system overhead including development and management issues. The routing stage 304 generates a set of coordinating components that will exchange data. The initiation, application, and monitoring of the components is dynamic and performed with coordinating agents. The previous multitude of data engines can be replaced with a configurable routing stage to efficiently handle information management with significantly reduced overhead.
The method 300 performs the optimizing stage 306, which is configured to analyze the history of the planning stage 302 and the routing stage 304 using speculative rules to predict future planning stages in response to changes in the operating environment that will retrigger features of the planning stage 302. Administrators using the system are thus able to reduce overheads associated with monitoring node or device failures, generating engines, or data growth.
Initially, an administrator can generate a Protection SLO for each application or set of data being protected. For example, an administrator can configure a Protection SLO for a class of applications generally as certain applications corresponding with a function of a business entity. More particularly, the administrator can configure a Protection SLO for a set of applications corresponding to relational databases in the finance department. An administrator can also configure a Protection SLO for data classes, such as all documents that operate with a certain application. More particularly, the administrator can configure a Protection SLO for a set of presentation documents adapted to be run with a presentation application such as that sold under the trade designation of “PowerPoint” from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., U.S.A., i.e., a Protection SLO for all PowerPoint presentations. Any newly discovered nodes, servers, or documents as well existing nodes, servers and documents that fall under the Protection SLOs if they match the classes specified in a Protection SLO.
In one example, an administrator can provide a Protection SLO with such information as the importance of the data being protected, timeliness preferences, speed of recovery preferences, disaster recovery preferences, and the like. The example provided does not specify particular nodes or devices for use in the Protection SLO, particular times of data movements so that the protection expert 402 can use flexibility to configure the system to meet the Protection SLOs. The protection expert 402, however, can be provided with hints, suggestions, or background information specific to the operating environment 100, which can automatically be taken into account in the protection expert 402. For example, the information can include a time period when network traffic is low or otherwise suitable for data copy (i.e., backup window), and the like.
The protection expert can also exchange information with a scoring function 410 and a configurable planning rules repository 412. The planning rules repository 412 includes sets of rules for at least one of the stages. Some of these sets of rules are for use with the planning stage 302 in order to calculate the score of different solutions. In addition there can be sets of speculative rules used within the optimization stage 306. Both the scoring function 410 and the configurable rules repository 412 are described below.
When used in the planning stage 302 of
In addition to the rules derived from the Protection SLOs, the protection engine is using additional rules that either reflect constraints within the environment (such as network band width) device capabilities (such as throughput) or rules that reflect common best practices applied by administrators (such as circumstance where a Storage Area Network is preferred over a local area network for connected devices).
The protection expert 402 computed feasibility score for each alternate solution as a weighted average of the number constraints developed with the scoring function 410. The rule-based solver is used to list all of the generated job plans. On the condition that the protection expert 402 is not able to meet the Protection SLO, for example, the protection expert 402 can indicate a failure and/or recommend alternative solutions for the failed job plans. The protection expert 402 can generate a repository 414 of at least one job plan that succeeded to meet the Protection SLOs and also, in one example, a repository 416 of job plans that failed to meet the Protection SLOs. When a job plan from repository 414 is put into execution, the protection expert 402 will dynamically resolve the order of application back ups to be performed as well as the devices or sets of devices to be used for the data protection. During runtimes in one example, the job plans can be configured with a set of rules to select devices based on availability, network bandwidth, or to minimize maintenance issues, or the like.
A set of components 504 that are connected together perform the data transfer or routing stage 304 of method 300. Data transferred also includes meta data. The components 504 are generic and can be dynamically coupled together to execute the job plan in contrast to having to maintain a large set of specialized data movement engines. In one example, the filter chain 502 includes a disk agent 507 and a media agent 508, which are controlled by the management station 506. Data flows from component to component along arrows 510. The connected-together components 504 from a unified information management bus 511 for routing data. Components, or filters, can be selected from a group of existing filters stored in a filter library 514.
The management station 506 includes a configuration manager 518 that deploys the components 504 of the filter chain 502 to the various IM clients on the network 106. The management station 506 also includes a dispatcher 520 that is used to execute a job from a selected job plan. In one example, the dispatcher 520 can prioritize jobs from several received or pending job plans. In one example, the dispatcher 520 interfaces with and receives job plans from the protection system 400. The management station 506 also includes a job execution engine 522.
The job execution engine 522 creates and monitors the filter chain 502. The job execution engine 522 interfaces with a policies repository 524, which contains blueprints of the filter chains 502 and with a state of chain repository 526. The rules repository 412 can also be configured to include policy type rules included in policies repository 524 that can be used within the routing stage 304. The policies can be evaluated by a rules-based system, which can be separate from the rules-based planner, in order to determine if the policies are fulfilled or violated. The job execution engine 522 also includes a controller 528, a binder 530, and loader 532 that are used to perform the respective features of the engine 522. The job execution engine 522 also includes a flow manager 534 to execute the details of the job plan.
The flow manager 534 includes a flow organizer 536, a flow controller 538, and an exception handler 540. The flow organizer 536 uses a blue print of a filter chain for a given operation, creates an instance of the filter chain from the blue print, and assigns various resources to execute the filter chain in an optimal manner. The flow controller 538 is used to execute the instance of filter chain created with the flow organizer 536. The flow controller 638 will set up the bus and all the components 504 along the bus. As a component completes all the tasks allocated to it, the flow controller 538 is responsible for starting other components, assign new tasks or deleting old components in the filter chain 502. The exception handler 640 resolves events on the components that will employ centralized management.
The job execution engine 522 receives the job plan from the protection system 400 and adds further details such as the name of an agent and the client on which that agent is started. The type of job to be executed is used to arrive at the name of the agent. For example, a back up type job includes a change control filter 550 coupled to a data reader 552, which are started at the source client. The factors that govern clients of the data writer filters 554, 556, for example, depends on the accessibility of the destination device, or node, to the source client and other factors considered in the job plan developed with the protection system 400. In the case of a job plan requesting an archival copy, a suitable archival appliance 558, 560, for example, is chosen from node pool. The job execution engine 522 also sets up the intermediate filters in the data transformation on one or more hosts on the network 106, which could be hosts other than those used for the source or destination, i.e., hosts other than used for the data reader 552 and the data writers 554, 556 and are selected based on performance considerations. The data reader 552 can be connected to a compression filter 562 encryption filter 564, which compresses and encrypts the data including the meta data. The data reader filter 552 is also coupled to a logger filter 566, in the example. The logger and encryption filters 566, 564, form the disk agent 506 are couple to a mirror filter 568 of the media agent 508. In addition to being coupled to the data writers 554, 556, the mirror 568 is also coupled to a catalog writer filter 570 which can then write to a catalog 572 on the network 106.
An example blue print of a portion of the simplified filter chain 502 described above can be expressed the following pseudo-code:
The source node is specified in DataReader, but the host on which to start is variable and depends on the application class, from the protection system 400, for which the back up is being performed. The assigner indicates the function used to perform the actual routing between the components 504. Because this can be configured, an administrator can add a new function to be performed a different type of operation if it not already supported.
The flow organizer 536 can complete the blue pint and outputs a job execution plan such as an example expressed in the following pseudo-code:
Although specific embodiments have been illustrated and described herein, it will be appreciated by those of ordinary skill in the art that a variety of alternate and/or equivalent implementations may be substituted for the specific embodiments shown and described without departing from the scope of the present invention. This application is intended to cover any adaptations or variations of the specific embodiments discussed herein. Therefore, it is intended that this invention be limited only by the claims and the equivalents thereof.
| Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind | 371c Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCT/US10/38870 | 6/16/2010 | WO | 00 | 11/14/2012 |
