142 results about "Thin provisioning" patented technology

A method, system, apparatus, and computer-readable medium are provided for improving storage in a disk array are provided. According to aspects of the invention, a redundant disk array is combined with a mechanism for thin provisioning of the array. Thin provisioning refers to a process of allocating physical capacity to logical volumes on an as-needed basis. Data structures containing a mapping between the logical location of stored data and its actual location on a physical device are maintained. Through the use of the thin provisioning mechanism, physical storage space can be allocated sequentially, regardless of the order of logical writes. In this manner, the data stored on the array grows in a linear manner. The data structures maintained by the thin provisioning mechanism can be used to identify the portions of a device or an array that have been previously written. This information allows redundant arrays, such as RAID arrays, to perform initialization, rebuild, and data migration operations only on portions that been written, and not on areas that have not been utilized by a higher layer.

The invention provides a system to reclaim space identified as no longer in use and comprises a vLUN, a thinly provisioned mapped LUN, a mapping layer, and a data reduction engine. Chunks of data are stored at logical chunk addresses (LCAs) in the vLUN and are mapped to corresponding physical chunk addresses (PCAs) in the thinly provisioned mapped LUN. The data reduction engine performs a data reduction process on a first logical chunk of data stored at a first LCA in the vLUN, where the first logical chunk has a size that is a nonzero integer multiple of the size of the storage extent of the thinly provisioned mapped LUN. After the data reduction process, the PCA associated with the first logical chunk is no longer needed, and the thinly provisioned mapped LUN is instructed to deallocate the PCA associated with the first logical chunk that is no longer needed.

A data storage system and method for simultaneously providing thin provisioning and high availability. The system includes external storage volume and two storage subsystems coupled together and to external storage volume. Each of storage subsystems includes disk drives and a cache area, each of the storage subsystems includes at least one virtual volume and at least one capacity pool. The virtual volume is allocated from storage elements of the at least one capacity pool. The capacity pool includes the disk drives and at least a portion of external storage volume. The storage elements of the capacity pool are allocated to the virtual volume in response to a data access request. The system further includes a host computer coupled to the storage subsystems and configured to switch input / output path between the storage subsystems. Each of the storage subsystems is adapted to copy received write I / O request to other storage subsystems. Upon receipt of request from another storage subsystem, storage element of the capacity pool of storage subsystem is prevented from being allocated to the virtual volume of that storage subsystem.

A method, medium and apparatus for managing storage in a thin-provisioning storage device. The method includes ceasing to use storage on thinly provisioned storage delivered by a thin-provisioning storage device and notifying the thin-provisioning storage device of the unused storage. The method may further include reclaiming the unused storage in response to the notification. Alternatively, the notification may include recognizing the storage being freed and communicating the recognition to the storage device. In another form, the invention is a method, medium and apparatus for managing storage in a thin-provisioning storage device. This method includes delivering thinly provisioned storage and receiving notification that part of the thinly provisioned storage is no longer in use. The method may further include reclaiming that part of the thinly provisioned storage in response to the notification. Between receiving and reclaiming, the method may wait for a time to pass.