System and method for an on-demand peer-to-peer storage virtualization infrastructure

• US 7,499,980 B2
• Filed: 08/19/2004
• Issued: 03/03/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 08/19/2004
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Waters, Timothy Moffett, Seaman, James Wesley, Gusler, Carl Phillip, Hamilton, Rick Allen II
• Primary Examiner(s): Abdullahi; Salad
• Assistant Examiner(s): Hussain; Imad
• Application Number:
  US10/922,281
• Publication Number:
  US 20060041619A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,657 Days
• Field of Search: 709/203, 709/205, 709/214, 709/223, 707/E17
• US Class Current: 709/214
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0608 Saving storage space on storage systems
• 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: H04L 67/104 Peer-to-peer [P2P] networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1074 for supporting data block transmission mechanisms file transfer H04L67/06

Abstract

A system and method for creating an on-demand virtual drive from dedicated storage on a plurality of partners in a peer-to-peer network using an agent installed on each of the partners. The agent has a contributing program and a requesting program. The contributing program creates a first storage unit and a second storage unit, formatting the second storage unit so that it is not visible to the operating system of the partner and transmitting the size of the second storage unit to the other partners. The requesting partner creates a virtual drive using space on selected partner'"'"'s second drives, and directs data blocks in and out of the virtual drive. A rules engine incorporating RAID algorithms governs the selection of the partners and allocation of available space.

Claims

1. Art apparatus for providing on-demand distributed storage in a peer-to-peer network comprising:

a plurality of partners connected by the peer-to-peer network;

an agent in a memory of each of the plurality of partners enabling each partner in the network to directly communicate and share data with each of the other partner in the network;

a contributing progam in the agent configured to identify all available storage in a partner computer, to partition the identified storage into a first storage unit and a second storage unit based upon a predefined threshold value, to format the second storage unit so that the second storage unit is not visible to the operating system of the partner computer, and to transmit the amount of available space in the second storage unit to each of the other partners in the system; and

a requesting program in the agent configured to receive a demand for storage from a requesting partner, to perform a scan to determine the physical storage available in the second storage unit of each partner other than the requesting partner, to engage a rules engine to select a plurality of second storage units, to allocate a plurality of spaces from each of the selected second storage units, to allocate a plurality of additional spaces from each of the selected second storage units for storing parity information, to allocate a space from the first storage unit of the requesting partner for redundancy of parity information stored on each of the selected second storage units, to create a virtual drive from the plurality of spaces to satisfy the demand for storage, and to direct a plurality of data blocks in and out of the virtual drive.