STORAGE SYSTEM WITH VIRTUAL DISKS

• US 20160004481A1
• Filed: 07/02/2014
• Published: 01/07/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 07/02/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: CommVault Systems Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Hedvig Inc. (CommVault Systems Incorporated)
• Inventors: LAKSHMAN, Avinash
• Granted Patent: US 10,067,722 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0605 by facilitating the interaction with a user or administrator
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0631 by allocating resources to storage systems
• 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 3/0689 Disk arrays, e.g. RAID, JBOD
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45533 Hypervisors; Virtual machine monitors

Abstract

An administrator provisions a virtual disk in a remote storage platform and defines policies for that virtual disk. A virtual machine writes to and reads from the storage platform using any storage protocol. Virtual disk data within a failed storage pool is migrated to different storage pools while still respecting the policies of each virtual disk. Snapshot and revert commands are given for a virtual disk at a particular point in time and overhead is minimal. A virtual disk is cloned utilizing snapshot information and no data need be copied. Any number of Zookeeper clusters are executing in a coordinated fashion within the storage platform, thus increasing overall throughput. A timestamp is generated that guarantees a monotonically increasing counter, even upon a crash of a virtual machine. Any virtual disk has a “hybrid cloud aware” policy in which one replica of the virtual disk is stored in a public cloud.

Claims

1. A method of provisioning a virtual disk within a storage platform of computer nodes, said method comprising:

accessing said storage platform remotely using a computer;

selecting a name and a size for said virtual disk;

choosing at least one policy for said virtual disk that is respected by said virtual disk within said storage platform;

storing said virtual disk name, said size and said at least one policy as metadata on one of said computer nodes; and

attaching said virtual disk to a computer server located in a compute farm remote from said storage platform, whereby a software application of said computer server is able to write into said virtual disk in order to save data into said storage platform after said attaching.

2. The method as recited in claim 1 wherein said storage platform is a data center.

3. The method as recited in claim 1 wherein said at least one policy is a replication factor policy, a residence policy, or a replication location policy.

4. The method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

attaching said virtual disk to a controller virtual machine of said computer server.

5. The method as recited in claim 4 wherein said software application executes within a virtual machine of said computer server and writes to said virtual disk via said controller virtual machine.

6. The method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

allocating space for said virtual disk on computer nodes of said storage platform.

7. The method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

performing said provisioning and attaching without allocating any space on any storage disks of said computer nodes of said storage platform.

8. The method as recited in claim 1 wherein said at least one policy is a hybrid cloud aware policy dictating that at least one replica of any data stored within said virtual disk shall be stored within said storage platform and that at least one replica of said data shall be stored within a public cloud storage platform.

9. The method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

writing data to said virtual disk from said software application; and

allocating space on at least one storage disk of a computer node of said storage platform and writing said data into said space on said storage disk.

10. A method of storing data to a virtual disk of a storage platform, said method comprising:

provisioning said virtual disk within said storage platform, said virtual disk including a name and a size;

choosing a hybrid cloud aware policy for said virtual disk dictating that at least one replica of any data stored within said virtual disk shall be stored within said storage platform and that at least one replica of said data shall be stored within a public cloud storage platform;

issuing a write request from a software application on a computer server remote from said storage platform, said write request including data to be written into said virtual disk on said storage platform;

writing a first replica of said data onto at least one storage disk of a computer node of said storage platform; and

writing a second replica of said data onto at least one storage disk of a computer node of said public cloud storage platform.

11. The method as recited in claim 10 further comprising:

retrieving said hybrid cloud aware policy for said dirt virtual disk from a metadata computer node of said storage platform, directing that said writing of said second replica take place based upon said hybrid cloud aware policy.

12. The method as recited in claim 10 further comprising:

always maintaining at least one replica of said virtual disk on the computer nodes of said storage platform and at least one replica of said virtual disk on computer nodes of said public cloud storage platform.

13. The method as recited in claim 10 further comprising:

detecting that a replica of said virtual disk within said public cloud storage platform has been lost; and

requiring that a new replica of said virtual disk be stored within said public cloud storage platform.

14. The method as recited in claim 10 wherein said software application executes within a virtual machine of said computer server and writes to said virtual disk via a controller virtual machine of said computer server.