Scalable storage devices

摘要

Techniques using scalable storage devices represent a plurality of host-accessible storage devices as a single logical interface, conceptually aggregating storage implemented by the devices. A primary agent of the devices accepts storage requests from the host using a host-interface protocol, processing the requests internally and/or forwarding the requests as sub-requests to secondary agents of the storage devices using a peer-to-peer protocol. The secondary agents accept and process the sub-requests, and report sub-status information for each of the sub-requests to the primary agent and/or the host. The primary agent optionally accumulates the sub-statuses into an overall status for providing to the host. Peer-to-peer communication between the agents is optionally used to communicate redundancy information during host accesses and/or failure recoveries. Various failure recovery techniques reallocate storage, reassign agents, recover data via redundancy information, or any combination thereof.

主权项

1. A system comprising:
host interface logic of a primary agent storage device visible to a host, the host interface logic enabled to interface to the host via a host-interface protocol and to interface to a secondary agent storage device invisible to the host via a peer-to-peer protocol, the interfacing to the host comprising reading a storage request from an entry in a submission queue, the interfacing to the secondary agent storage device comprising forwarding a storage sub-request to the secondary agent storage device, the interfacing to the host and the interfacing to the secondary agent storage device being via a same physical channel; sub-request generation logic of the primary agent storage device enabled to generate the storage sub-request based at least in part on address information comprised in the storage request; and storage capacity reporting logic of the primary agent storage device enabled to report back to the host a total storage capacity, the total storage capacity based at least in part on a storage capacity of the secondary agent storage device.