Proactive rebalancing of data among storage devices that are part of a virtual disk

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-12254208-B2
Application number	US-202318105985-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Feb 6, 2023
Priority date	Feb 6, 2023
Publication date	Mar 18, 2025
Grant date	Mar 18, 2025

Abstract

An apparatus comprises a processing device configured to monitor a health status of storage devices that are part of a virtual disk and to identify a first subset of the storage devices that have a first health status and a second subset of the storage devices that have a second health status. The processing device is also configured, responsive to determining that there is sufficient available storage capacity on the second subset of the storage devices to copy data from used storage capacity on the first subset of the storage devices, to resize the virtual disk to a storage capacity determined as a function of storage capacities of the second subset of the storage devices allocated to the virtual disk and to copy data from the used storage capacity on the first subset of the storage devices to the available storage capacity on the second subset of the storage devices.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. An apparatus comprising:
at least one processing device comprising a processor coupled to a memory;
the at least one processing device being configured:
to monitor a health status of two or more storage devices that are part of a virtual disk, the virtual disk utilizing a redundant array of independent disks striping configuration;
to identify, based at least in part on the monitored health status, a first subset of the two or more storage devices that have a first health status and a second subset of the two or more storage devices that have a second health status;
to monitor, for each of the storage devices in the first subset of the two or more storage devices, an estimated time to failure, wherein monitoring the estimated time to failure for a given one of the storage devices in the first subset of the two or more storage devices is based at least in part on determining one or more changes in error percentages in a sequence of two or more timestamped error logs associated with the given storage device;
to determine whether available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices is sufficient to copy data from used storage capacity on the first subset of the two or more storage devices;
responsive to determining that there is sufficient available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices, to resize the virtual disk from (i) a first storage capacity determined at least in part as a function of portions of storage capacities of the first and second subsets of the two or more storage devices which are allocated to the virtual disk to (ii) a second storage capacity determined at least in part as a function of portions of storage capacities of the second subset of the two or more storage devices which are allocated to the virtual disk;
to copy data from the used storage capacity on the first subset of the two or more storage devices to the available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices; and
to dynamically adjust, in conjunction with copying of the data from the used storage capacity on the first subset of the two or more storage devices to the available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices and based at least in part on the estimated time to failure for each of the storage devices in the first subset of the two or more storage devices, a first amount of storage controller bandwidth allocated for copying of the data from the used storage capacity on the first subset of the two or more storage devices to the available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices relative to a second amount of storage controller bandwidth allocated for processing incoming input-output operations directed to the virtual disk.

2. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the redundant array of independent disks striping configuration comprises a RAID0 configuration.

3. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein monitoring the health status of the two or more storage devices that are part of the virtual disk comprises obtaining one or more error logs utilizing one or more support tools associated with a storage system comprising the two or more storage devices.

4. The apparatus of claim 3 wherein the one or more error logs comprise Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology error logs generated by respective ones of the two or more storage devices.

5. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the first health status comprises a failing health status and the second health status comprises a non-failing health status.

6. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the at least one processing device is further configured, responsive to determining that there is sufficient available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices, to place the first subset of the two or more storage devices in a frozen state where incoming data reads are permitted but incoming data writes are blocked.

7. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the two or more timestamped error logs comprise Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) logs, and wherein the error percentage comprises a percentage of SMART errors.

8. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein monitoring the estimated time to failure for the given storage device comprises dynamically updating the estimated time to failure for the given storage device responsive to detecting an increase in the error percentage between two timestamped error logs in the sequence of two or more timestamped error logs associated with the given storage device.

9. The apparatus of claim 1 the estimated time to failure for the given storage device is determined based at least in part on utilizing the sequence of two or more timestamped error logs associated with the given storage device to calculate a time taken for the error percentage to increase from a first percentage to a second percentage.

10. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the at least one processing device is further configured, during copying of the data from the used storage capacity on the first subset of the two or more storage devices to the available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices:
to determine and dynamically update estimated time to failure values for each of the storage devices in the first subset of the two or more storage devices; and
to dynamically adjust the first amount of storage controller bandwidth allocated for copying the data from the used storage capacity on the first subset of the two or more storage devices to the available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices relative to the second amount of storage controller bandwidth allocated for processing of incoming input-output operations directed to the virtual disk based at least in part on the dynamically updated estimated time to failure values for each of the storage devices in the first subset of the two or more storage devices.

11. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein dynamically adjusting the first amount of storage controller bandwidth allocated for copying of the data from the used storage capacity on the first subset of the two or more storage devices to the available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices relative to the second amount of storage controller bandwidth allocated for processing incoming input-output operations directed to the virtual disk is based at least in part on the monitored health status of the two or more storage devices.

12. The apparatus of claim 11 wherein controlling the first and second amounts of storage controller bandwidth comprises increasing the second amount of storage controller bandwidth and decreasing the first amount of storage controller bandwidth as a predicted time to failure of one or more of the storage devices in the first subset of the two or more storage devices decreases.

13. The apparatus of claim 11 wherein controlling the first and second amounts of storage controller bandwidth comprises selecting from among two or more policies based at least in part on a predicted time to failure of one or more of the storage devices in the first subset of the two or more storage devices.

14. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the at least one processing device is further configured, responsive to determining that there is not sufficient available storage capacity on the second subset of the two or more storage devices, to generate and provide one or more notifications to one or more users associated with the virtual disk.

15. A computer program product comprising a non-trans

Assignees

• Dell Products Lp

Inventors

• Sethi Parminder Singh
• Kumar Suren
• Das Akshita

Classifications

• G06F11/3034

  where the computing system component is a storage system, e.g. DASD based or network based (digital input from or digital output to record carriers G06F3/06; digital recording or reproducing G11B20/18; for distributed storage of data in networks, e.g. transport arrangements for network file system [NFS], storage area networks [SAN] or network attached storage [NAS], H04L67/1097) · CPC title

• G06F3/0689

  Disk arrays, e.g. RAID, JBOD · CPC title

• G06F3/0619 Primary

  in relation to data integrity, e.g. data losses, bit errors · CPC title

• G06F3/0653

  Monitoring storage devices or systems · CPC title

• G06F3/065 Primary

  Replication mechanisms · CPC title