Environment classification and service analysis

• US 8,346,748 B1
• Filed: 03/30/2007
• Issued: 01/01/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 09/18/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Emc IP Holding Company LLC (Dell Technologies Inc.)
• Original Assignee: EMC Corporation (Dell Technologies Inc.)
• Inventors: Nair, Manoj, Vukelja, Iva Blazina, Dugganapally, Arun, Perrin, Stephen R.
• Primary Examiner(s): AL HASHEMI, SANA A
• Application Number:
  US11/694,753
• Time in Patent Office: 2,104 Days
• Field of Search: 707/706, 707/749, 707/791, 707/795, 707/960
• US Class Current: 707/706
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/16 File or folder operations, e.g. details of user interfaces specifically adapted to file systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/285 Clustering or classification
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/957 Browsing optimisation, e.g. caching or content distillation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/067 Distributed or networked storage systems, e.g. storage area networks [SAN], network attached storage [NAS]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/12 Discovery or management of network topologies
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/40 using virtualisation of network functions or resources, e.g. SDN or NFV entities
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5003 Managing SLA; Interaction between SLA and QoS
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5009 Determining service level performance parameters or violations of service level contracts, e.g. violations of agreed response time or mean time between failures [MTBF]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/51 Discovery or management thereof, e.g. service location protocol [SLP] or web services
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99931 Database or file accessing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99942 Manipulating data structure, e.g. compression, compaction, compilation

Abstract

Discovering environment objects for information management in a networked environment. Information management provides services such as data protection, backup, retention, compliance, etc., by classifying the objects and/or infrastructure of an entity according to its value to the entity. Information management begins by discovering the data in a network and by discovering the servers and services operating in a network. The servers and services are discovered using adapters that can collect information regarding the environment objects. This information can then by used by information management systems to assign or orchestrate various services.

Claims

1. In a computing environment, a method for discovering environment objects in the computing environment to provide information management, the method comprising:

querying the computing environment to discover and collect information about the environment objects in the computing environment by an information management system, wherein the information management system is configured to identify services for data objects stored in the computing environment and orchestrate performance of the services for the data objects, wherein querying the computing environment includes;

walking IP addresses in the computing environment to at least discover which of the environment objects act like servers, wherein which environment objects act like servers is included in the collected information;

using one or more adapters that interface with an information management system and with the computing environment to identify the environment objects in the computing environment and/or collect the information environment objects, wherein some of the one or more adapters are configured to collect specific data from the environment objects, wherein the specific data is included in collected information; and

monitoring the computing environment to discover relationships between the environment objects, wherein the environment objects in the computing environment include at least one of servers and services and applications operating in a network included in the computing environment, wherein information about the relationships is included in the collected information;

providing the collected information to the information management system, wherein the collected information is stored in a database by the information management system,

wherein the collected information identifies at least hardware in the computing environment, software operating in the computing environment, a hardware configuration of the hardware, a software configuration of the software, and relationships between the software and the hardware or between software or between hardware; and

generating results from the collected information stored in the database, wherein the results enable the information management system to assign service levels to the data objects in the computing environment based on the information collected from the environment objects, wherein the services are provided to the data objects according to the assigned service levels.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising initiating discovery of the environment objects when an event is detected in the computing environment.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein querying the computing environment further comprises walking the IP addresses with a first adapter and monitoring the computing environment with a second adapter, the first and second adapters included in the one or more adapters.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising collecting compatibility information for the discovered environment objects using a third adapter that uses data collected by other of the one or more adapters to collect the compatibility information.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising using a fourth adapter to collect collecting information that includes one or more of, firmware version, type of storage, IP addresses of storage devices, tiered storage capabilities, or any combination thereof.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein querying the computing environment further comprises discovering applications operating in the computing environment.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising classifying the discovered environment objects by assigning one or more categories to each environment object.

8. The method of claim 2, wherein initiating discovery further comprises detecting the event, wherein the event is one or more of a change in hardware or software to the computing environment.

9. The method of claim 6, further comprising assigning the service levels to the data objects in the computing environment based on the categories assigned to each environment object.

10. The method of claim 8, further comprising determining whether the servers are one of email servers, backup servers, file servers, or application servers.