| 摘要 |
Methods and associated apparatus for maintaining management information pertaining to a storage subsystem attached to a plurality of host systems. In particular, the present invention stores configuration and other management information regarding a storage subsystem in a reserved area of the storage subsystem called a host store region (HSR). The configuration information is timestamped by the storage subsystem when stored in the HSR. The information written therein is written and read by attached host systems using standard read and write commands directed specifically to the HSR. The storage subsystem has a reserved area distinct from the storage capacity used for persistent storage of host supplied data. A portion (the HSR) of this reserved area is set aside as a scratchpad for use by all attached host systems to communicate management information among one another. The present invention uses the existing communication channel between each of the attached host systems and the common storage subsystem. Where, for example, the storage subsystem is a RAID storage subsystem attached to the host systems by SCSI interfaces, the SCSI interface is used by each host system to access the HSR thus obviating the need for another communication channel to synchronize all attached host systems. A host system modifying the configuration or state of the storage subsystem writes an appropriate message to the HSR to indicate the management information modification. All host systems periodically poll the HSR to determine the present administrative state and configuration information.
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