Selection of migration methods including partial read restore in distributed storage management

• US 8,055,724 B2
• Filed: 03/21/2005
• Issued: 11/08/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 03/21/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Emc IP Holding Company LLC (Dell Technologies Inc.)
• Original Assignee: EMC Corporation (Dell Technologies Inc.)
• Inventors: Compton, James T., Stacey, Christopher H., Gross, Jerald W., Amegadzie, Augustine, Rago, Stephen A, Zimran, Eyal
• Primary Examiner(s): DONAGHUE, LARRY D
• Application Number:
  US11/085,898
• Publication Number:
  US 20060212746A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,423 Days
• Field of Search: 709/223, 709/217
• US Class Current: 709/217
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/185 Hierarchical storage management [HSM] systems, e.g. file migration or policies thereof details of archiving G06F16/11

Abstract

A hierarchical storage system is constructed from file servers and a policy engine server by building upon a file migration service. Offline attributes are added to file system inodes in a primary file server, file system parameters are added in the primary server, an offline read access method field is added to a connection database, and the primary file server is programmed to use these attributes and parameters for selecting a particular method (such as a partial read migration or a pass through read method) for read access to an offline file. In this fashion, the primary file server is provided with flexibility for selecting a particular one of a number of migration methods depending on various conditions, in order to improve the trade-off between the cost of storage and delay in file access.

Claims

1. A method of operating a file server in a data network for access to file data that is migrated between primary storage and secondary storage, the file server responding to a client request for read access to a specified file by checking whether file data of the specified file has been migrated from the primary storage to the secondary storage, and upon finding that file data of the specified file has been migrated from the primary storage to the secondary storage, selecting a particular one of a number of offline file read access methods that are selectable by the file server under various conditions, the offline file read access methods including a partial read migration method for migrating only a portion of the data of an offline file from the secondary storage to the primary storage for retention in the primary storage after client read access, and a pass-through method in which the file server obtains file data from the secondary storage and passes on to a client the file data obtained from the secondary storage without retention in the primary storage of the file data obtained from the secondary storage;

which further includes the file server responding to a request to truncate a partially migrated offline file to a new offset that is less than an extent of the partially migrated offline file, the file server responding to the request to truncate the partially migrated offline file by checking whether data of the partially migrated offline file up to the new offset is presently resident in the primary storage of the file server, and upon finding that data of the partially migrated offline file up to the new offset is presently resident in the primary storage of the file server, truncating the partially migrated offline file to the new offset by setting the extent of the partially migrated offline file to the new offset, and setting the partially migrated offline file to online status.

2. The method as claimed in claim 1, which includes the file server selecting the pass-through read method upon finding that the specified file is in a read-only file system.

3. The method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the specified file is one of a plurality of files contained in a file system, and the method includes the file server checking a file system attribute of the file system indicating whether a particular one of the number of offline file read access methods that are selectable by the file server under various conditions has been set as a run-time option for the file system, and upon finding that a particular one of the number of offline file read access methods that are selectable by the file server under various conditions has been set as a run-time option for the file system, selecting the particular one of the number of offline file read access methods that are selectable by the file server under various conditions that has been set as a run-time option for the file system.

4. The method as claimed in claim 1, which includes the file server checking whether the client request for read access was made by a particular kind of client for which a particular one of the number of offline file read access methods that are selectable by the file server under various conditions that has been set, and upon finding that the client request for read access was made by a particular kind of client for which a particular one of the number of offline file read access methods that are selectable by the file server under various conditions has been set, selecting the particular one of the number of offline file read access methods that are selectable by the file server under various conditions that has been set for the particular kind of client.

5. The method as claimed in claim 1, which includes the file server responding to read requests from an archiving client by checking whether the read requests originated from an archiving kind of client, and upon finding that the read requests originated from an archiving kind of client, checking whether runtime options for an archiving client type have been set for reading or not reading offline attributes of offline files, and for reading or not reading offline data of offline files.

6. The method as claimed in claim 1, which includes the file server responding to a read request from an anti-virus checking client for reading an offline file by checking whether the read request originated from an anti-virus checking kind of client, and upon finding that the read request originated from an anti-virus checking kind of client, selecting a pass-through read method for servicing the read request from the anti-virus checking client.