FILESYSTEM-AWARE BLOCK STORAGE SYSTEM, APPARATUS, AND METHOD

摘要

A filesystem-aware storage system locates and analyzes host filesystem da ta structures in order to determine storage usage of the host filesystem. To this end, the storage system might locate an operating system partition, pa rse the operating system partition to locate its data structures, and parse the operating system data structures to locate the host filesystem data stru ctures. The storage system manages data storage based on the storage usage o f the host file system. The storage system can use the storage usage informa tion to identify storage areas that are no longer being used by the host fil esystem and reclaim those areas for additional data storage capacity. Also, the storage system can identify the types of data stored by the host filesys tem and manage data storage based on the data types, such as selecting a sto rage layout and/or an encoding scheme for the data based on the data type.