Method and apparatus for synchronizing storage volumes

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-8938641-B2
Application number	US-201213628257-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Sep 27, 2012
Priority date	Sep 27, 2012
Publication date	Jan 20, 2015
Grant date	Jan 20, 2015

Abstract

A disk array redundancy controller ensures integrity of a mirrored or RAID storage array supporting a host system and minimizes recovery time responsive to a storage volume failure by traversing caches of recently written blocks to identify partially flushed stripes of data and recovering the inconsistent stripes on each of the storage volumes based on a master copy derived from the scan of all pre-failure caches of the storage array. The storage array employs nonvolatile caches in conjunction with solid state drive (SSD) storage volumes, allowing post-failure recovery of recently written blocks. A cache depth at least sufficient to store the largest stripe, or set of blocks, from the host ensures recovery of the entire stripe from a collective scan of the caches of all storage volumes of the storage array.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A method of ensuring integrity of redundant storage comprising:
scanning a plurality of caches corresponding to storage volumes of a storage array for identifying recently written blocks;
identifying, from the scanned caches, blocks belonging to a stripe that is suspect of being partially written to the storage array;
accumulating from the identified blocks, each of the blocks belonging to the suspect stripe; and
writing a recreated stripe of blocks ba…

Assignees

• Intel Corp

Inventors

• Veal Bryan E
• Foong Annie

Classifications

• G06F11/1474 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic