Data path accelerator with variable parity, variable length, and variable extent parity groups

摘要

A data path accelerator with variable parity, variable length, and variable extent groups is described. The data path accelerator includes a network interface for communicating with one or more clients and a storage interface for communicating with one or more disk drives. A metafile processor is configured to queue network transaction requests to the network interface and to queue storage transaction requests to the storage interface. The metafile processor is further configured to manage file system metafile information. The file system metafile information includes disk locations of one or more distributed parity groups on the one or more disk drives. Each distributed parity group includes one or more data blocks and a parity block. The file system metafile information further includes information regarding a length of each distributed parity group. A data engine is configured to communicate with the storage interface to receive data from or to write data to the one or more disk drives in satisfaction of the storage transaction requests. The data engine is further configured to communicate with the network interface to receive data from or to write data to the one or more clients in satisfaction of the network transaction requests. The data engine includes at least one data cache and one or more parity engines to perform parity calculations for cached distributed parity groups.