A stand-alone, network accessible data storage device, such as a filer or NAS device, is capable of transferring data objects based on portions of the data objects. The device transfers portions of files, folders, and other data objects from a data store within the device to external secondary storage based on certain criteria, such as time-based criteria, age-based criteria, and so on. A portion may be one or more blocks of a data object, or one or more chunks of a data object, or other segments that combine to form or store a data object. For example, the device identifies one or more blocks of a data object that satisfy a certain criteria, and migrates the identified blocks to external storage, thereby freeing up storage space within the device. The device may determine that a certain number of blocks of a file have not been modified or called by a file system in a certain time period, and migrate these blocks to secondary storage.

Data transfer techniques within data storage devices, such as network attached storage performing data migration

The systems and methods herein permit storage systems to correctly perform data recovery, such as direct access recovery, of Network Data Management Protocol (“NDMP”) backup data that was modified prior to being stored in secondary storage media, such as tape. For example, as described in greater detail herein, the systems and methods may permit NDMP backup data to be encrypted, compressed, deduplicated, and/or otherwise modified prior to storage. The systems and methods herein also permit a user to perform a precautionary snapshot of the current state of data (e.g., primary data) prior to reverting data to a previous state using point-in-time data.

Data recovery operations, such as recovery from modified network data management protocol data

A plurality of servers configured to receive a plurality of requests associated with a plurality of byte sequences are described herein. The requests for each byte sequence are received by a single one of the servers. Each server is further configured to serially process the requests it receives while the other servers also perform serial processing of requests in parallel with the server. Also, the requests for each byte sequence are transmitted to the single one of the servers by a plurality of clients, each client independently identifying the single one of the servers for the byte sequence based on system metadata.

Parallel Serialization of Request Processing

A method and system for providing information management of mobile device data provides a user interface to permit a user of an information management system to define information management policies for the mobile device, receives definitions of the information management policies from the provided interface, and sends data from the mobile device to the information management system in accordance with the information management policies. In some examples, the system sends information identifying the user and the mobile device to the information management system, and/or sends the information management policies defined from the interface to the information management system.

Information management of mobile device data

A metadata server configured to maintain storage assignment mappings in non-persistent storage is described herein. The tract storage assignment mappings associate servers with storage assignments, the storage assignments representing the data stored on the servers. Responsive to a failure, the metadata server receives the storage assignments from the servers and rebuilds the storage assignment mappings from the storage assignments. The metadata server is also configured to enable clients to operate during a recovery process for a failed server by providing the storage assignment mappings to the clients during the recovery process. Also during the recovery process, the replacement server for the failed server conditionally overwrites stored data with other data received from other servers as part of the recovery process. The replacement server conditionally overwrites based on version information associated with the data and version information associated with the other data, the version information being associated with one or more versions of the storage assignment mappings.

Server Failure Recovery

Method and system is provided for managing metadata for a plurality of data containers that are stored at one or more storage volumes in a clustered storage system The metadata is collected from one or more storage volumes and then provided to a catalog module The catalog module pre-processes the metadata and then generates a searchable data structure The searchable data structure may then be used to respond to a user request for information regarding the storage system

Method and system for managing metadata in a cluster based storage environment

Method and system is provided for managing metadata for a plurality of data containers that are stored at one or more storage volumes in a storage system. The metadata is collected from one or more storage volumes and then provided to a catalog module. The catalog module pre-processes the metadata and then generates a searchable data structure. The searchable data structure may then be used to respond to a user request for information regarding the storage system.

Method and system for managing metadata in a storage environment

Embodiments of the present invention provide a novel technique for maintaining directory-based quota, for performing directory notification to a client system, and performing other such operations by efficiently finding ancestral directory associations on a server system without performing multiple accesses to data structures associated with the directory associations. Since data structures do not need to be accessed multiple times, performance of the server system can be improved.

Mechanism for performing fast directory lookup in a server system

A new approach to support efficient management of directory quotas for a file system is proposed. The approach adopts bitmasks for files and directories in a file system, and transforms the problem of maintaining and traversing complicated file system data structures into a simple bitmask comparison and an associated lookup. It applies to files and directories under CIFS, NFS, other network file systems and local file systems and moves the costly operations of traversing the file system from file operations to administrative operation of switching the quotas on and off, which is infrequent and do not have the performance requirements of regular file operations.

Manish M. Agarwal

Papers

Method and system for managing metadata in a cluster based storage environment

Method and system for managing metadata in a storage environment

Mechanism for performing fast directory lookup in a server system

Management of directory quotas for file systems