Virtual physical drives
First Claim
1. A method comprising:
- mapping addressable storage units of a set of virtual physical drives to addressable storage units of a set of physical storage media; and
responding to storage access requests from a processor of a host computer such that the virtual physical drives appear to the processor as physically independent drives.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A system includes a processor, a storage system having one or more physical storage devices, and a controller coupled to the processor and the storage system. The controller maintains a virtual physical drive (VPD) map that defines a set of virtual physical drives, and maps the virtual physical drives to storage media of the physical storage devices. The controller receives access requests from the processor and controls the physical storage media according to the VPD map such that the virtual physical drives appear to the processor as physically independent drives. The controller provides hardware-level security to prevent unauthorized access by the processor or any software application executing on processor. In addition, the controller may maintain primary virtual storage and secondary virtual storage within the virtual physical drives, and may dynamically reallocate the virtual storage to backup and restore data in a manner that appears almost instantaneous to the user.
135 Citations
40 Claims
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1. A method comprising:
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mapping addressable storage units of a set of virtual physical drives to addressable storage units of a set of physical storage media; and
responding to storage access requests from a processor of a host computer such that the virtual physical drives appear to the processor as physically independent drives. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
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8. A method comprising:
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mapping addressable storage units of a set of virtual physical drives to addressable storage units of a set of physical storage media;
intercepting access requests on an interface bus from a processor of a host computer to access the storage units of the virtual physical drives, wherein the each access request specifies one or more addresses for one of the virtual physical drives;
translating the specified addresses to addresses for the physical storage media in accordance with the mapping; and
issuing access requests to access the set of physical storage media in accordance with the translated addresses. - View Dependent Claims (9, 10, 11)
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12. A method comprising:
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generating a virtual physical drive (VPD) map that associates addressable storage units of a virtual physical drive to addressable storage units of a physical storage medium;
generating a virtual storage map (VSM) to allocate a primary virtual storage and a secondary virtual storage within the virtual physical drives;
maintaining a record of the data written to the secondary virtual storage; and
selectively reading data from the primary virtual storage and the secondary virtual storage based on the record. - View Dependent Claims (13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24)
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25. An apparatus comprising:
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a control unit;
a computer-readable medium to store a virtual physical drive (VPD) map that associates addressable storage units of a set of virtual physical drives to addressable storage units of a set of physical storage media of a storage system;
a first interface to couple the control unit to a processor of a host computer via a bus; and
wherein the control unit receives storage access requests from the processor and controls the physical storage media according to the VPD map such that the virtual physical drives appear to the processor as physically independent drives. - View Dependent Claims (26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38)
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39. A host computer comprising:
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a processor;
a storage system having one or more physical storage devices; and
a controller coupled to the processor and the storage system to maintain a virtual physical drive (VPD) map associating addressable storage units of a set of virtual physical drives to addressable storage units of a set of physical storage media of a storage system, wherein the controller receives storage access requests from the processor and controls the physical storage media according to the VPD map such that the virtual physical drives appear to the processor as physically independent drives. - View Dependent Claims (40)
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Specification