ABSTRACTING PROGRAMMATIC REPRESENTION OF DATA STORAGE SYSTEMS

• US 20100199109A1
• Filed: 02/02/2009
• Published: 08/05/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 02/02/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Sadovsky, Vladimir, Geiger, Avi R., Verma, Surendra, Terek, Soner
• Granted Patent: US 8,375,227 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 713/194
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 12/00 Accessing, addressing or allocating within memory systems or architectures digital input from, or digital output to record carriers, e.g. to disk storage units, G06F3/06
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0608 Saving storage space on storage systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/061 Improving I/O performance
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0626 Reducing size or complexity of storage systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/064 Management of blocks
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0671 In-line storage system

Abstract

Providing for a paradigm shift in block-level abstraction for storage devices is described herein. At a block-level, storage is characterized as a variable size data record, rather than a fixed size sector. In some aspects, the variable size data record can comprise a variable binary key-data pair, for addressing and identifying a variable size block of data, and for dynamically specifying the size of such block in terms of data storage. By changing the key or data values, the location, identity or size of block-level storage can be modified. Data records can be passed to and from the storage device to facilitate operational commands over ranges of such records. Block-level data compression, space management and transactional operations are provided, mitigating a need of higher level systems to characterize underlying data storage for implementation of such operations.

Claims

1. A data storage device, comprising:

a set of physical data storage blocks for digital storage of information;

a processing circuit electronically coupled to the storage blocks that directly maps a subset of the physical data storage blocks to a variable data record; and

an atomic record component that dynamically updates the mapping based on external input to data fields of the unstructured variable data record.

2. The data storage device of claim 1, further comprising a transport component that receives the data field inputs from a system external to the data storage device.

3. The data storage device of claim 2, the transport component outputs data stored by the subset of storage blocks in response to a data call comprising the data record.

4. The data storage device of claim 1, further comprising an aggregation component that clusters data mapped to data records having similar data record key values.

5. The data storage device of claim 4, the processing circuit stores the clustered data into adjacent subsets of storage blocks to facilitate efficient manipulation of such data.

6. The data storage device of claim 1, further comprising a compression component that employs data record prefix compression for data clustered in adjacent storage blocks.

7. The data storage device of claim 1, further comprising a protection component that implements block-level data security to mitigate tampering of stored data.

8. The data storage device of claim 7, the protection component executes an encryption algorithm for a range of variable data records marked for encryption by a host application or device.

9. The data storage device of claim 1, further comprising an operations component that processes insertion, update, deletion or read commands for a range of variable data records based on external input.

10. The data storage device of claim 1, the atomic record component implements block-level data transactioning for the physical storage blocks comprising an error detection, error correction, data decryption or data de-fragmentation operation.

11. A method for abstracting data storage, comprising:

employing a processing circuit of the data storage device to;

characterize a set of physical storage blocks of a data storage device;

map an unstructured variable data record to a subset of the physical storage blocks of the data storage device based on the characterization; and

facilitate external assignment of data record values to provide external control of storage operations for the subset of the physical storage blocks; and

storing the unstructured variable data record in a portion of the storage device.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising forming the unstructured variable data record with a variable data identifier and a variable data unit.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein:

the variable data unit comprises a variable length binary field for defining size of the subset of the storage blocks mapped to the data record; and

the variable data identifier comprises a second variable length binary field for distinguishing or locating the subset of the storage blocks.

14. The method of claim 12, further comprising employing the variable data identifier and variable data unit to form a variable size key-data pair.

15. The method of claim 11, further comprising clustering subsets of data records based on externally-defined key-data pair values assigned to such records.

16. The method of claim 11, further comprising compressing externally-assigned values of data records in storing the records on the data storage device.

17. The method of claim 16, further comprising employing prefix compression of adjacent data records to compress the externally-assigned values of data records.

18. The method of claim 11, further comprising obtaining a range of variable data records from an external host and executing encryption, insertion, deletion, update or read commands in response to a request from the external host.

19. The method of claim 11, further comprising providing semantic clustering of adjacent data records to facilitate atomic formation of abstracted data objects.

20. A system that manages data operations for a data storage device, comprising:

a memory interface that communicatively couples the system to a data storage device;

a retrieval component that employs the memory interface to obtain a set of data records from the storage device comprising respective variable size key-data pairs;

an input component that facilitates user modification of variable length binary fields associated with the key-data pairs;

an application component that generates an abstracted data object for data represented by the data records; and

a command component that returns modified data records to the data storage device comprising modified binary field values consistent with the abstracted data object, the data storage device dynamically restructures the data within physical storage blocks of the device based on the modified binary field values.