FILTER APPLIANCE FOR OBJECT-BASED STORAGE SYSTEM

• US 20140006731A1
• Filed: 06/29/2012
• Published: 01/02/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 06/29/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Vmware LLC (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: VMware, Inc. (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: VAGHANI, Satyam B., ULUSKI, Derek, TOMAR, Nagendra, SAKARGAYAN, Gourav
• Granted Patent: US 9,703,482 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 711/155
• 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 2009/45579 I/O management, e.g. providing access to device drivers or storage
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0604 Improving or facilitating administration, e.g. storage management
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0659 Command handling arrangements, e.g. command buffers, queues, command scheduling
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0665 at area level, e.g. provisioning of virtual or logical volumes
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/067 Distributed or networked storage systems, e.g. storage area networks [SAN], network attached storage [NAS]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects

Abstract

A framework for performing transformations of logical storage volumes in software is provided. This framework interposes on various operations that can be performed on a logical storage volume, such as input/output (IO) operations, via one or more filters, which may be implemented by an appliance that is inserted into the data path of the operations issued to the logical storage volume.

Claims

1. A method of interposing on operations targeted for execution on a logical storage volume, comprising:

receiving a read operation targeted for execution on a first logical storage volume;

issuing a read operation targeted for execution on a second logical storage volume, in place of the read operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume, to obtain read data from the second logical storage volume;

executing at least one filtering operation on the read data to generate transformed data; and

returning the transformed data in response to the received read operation.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein one filtering operation is executed on the read data and includes one of a decryption operation and a decompression operation.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein at least two filtering operations are executed on the read data.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein said at least two filtering operations include a cache operation.

5. The method of claim 4, further comprising:

terminating the issued read operation if the read data has been cached.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the first logical storage volume and the second logical storage volume map to the same physical storage locations of a storage system.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein the read operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume is received from a virtual machine.

8. A method of interposing on operations targeted for execution on a logical storage volume, comprising:

receiving a write operation targeted for execution on a first logical storage volume;

executing at least one filtering operation on data referenced in the received write operation to generate transformed data;

issuing a write operation targeted for execution on a second logical storage volume, in place of the write operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume, to write the transformed data to the second logical storage volume; and

returning a write acknowledgment in response to the received write operation upon receiving confirmation that the write operation targeted for execution on the second logical storage volume has completed.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein one filtering operation is executed on the data referenced in the received write operation and includes one of an encryption operation and a compression operation.

10. The method of claim 8, wherein at least two filtering operations are executed on the data referenced in the received write operation.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein said at least two filtering operations include a cache operation.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

in response to a subsequent write operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume, executing said at least one filtering operation on data referenced in the subsequent write operation and returning a write acknowledgment without issuing any write operation targeted for execution on either the first logical storage volume or the second logical storage volume if data generated from executing said at least one filtering operation on data referenced in the subsequent write operation is cached.

13. The method of claim 8, wherein the first logical storage volume and the second logical storage volume map to the same physical storage locations of a storage system.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein the write operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume is received from a virtual machine.

15. A method of interposing a filter in an input/output (JO) path between an issuer of IO operations and a logical storage volume that is provisioned in a logical storage container having an address space that maps to physical storage locations of a storage system, the method comprising:

creating a filtered logical storage container having properties defined by the filter within a filter appliance; and

logically moving the logical storage volume from the logical storage container to the filtered logical storage container such that IO operations in the IO path are redirected to the filter appliance for processing by the filter appliance.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein said logically moving includes notifying the filter appliance of an identifier of the logical storage volume.

17. The method of claim 15, wherein the filter appliance processes the IO operations redirected thereto in accordance with the properties defined by the filter.

18. The method of claim 17, wherein the properties defined by the filter include encryption/decryption.

19. The method of claim 17, wherein the properties defined by the filter include compression/decompression.

20. The method of claim 17, wherein the properties defined by the filter include caching.

21. A computer system having virtual machines (VMs) running therein, wherein one of the VMs is issuing input/output (JO) operations and another of the VMs is a filter appliance that is configured to:

receive a read/write operation targeted for execution on a first logical storage volume;

transform the read/write operation into a set of different operations including a read/write operation targeted for execution on a second logical storage volume;

issue the read/write operation targeted for execution on the second logical storage volume; and

return an indication of completion of the received read/write operation.

22. The computer system of claim 21, further comprising a virtual IO interposer that receives the read/write operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume, determines that the read/write operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume should be redirected to the filter appliance, and redirects the read/write operation targeted for execution on the first logical storage volume to the filter appliance.

23. The computer system of claim 22, wherein the virtual IO interposer further receives a read/write operation targeted for execution on a third logical storage volume, determines that the read/write operation targeted for execution on the third logical storage volume should not be redirected to the filter appliance, and issues the read/write operation targeted for execution on the third logical storage volume.