Teddy G Greer

US Patent:

20060031605, Feb 9, 2006

Filed:

Jul 2, 2004

Appl. No.:

10/884295

Inventors:

Kelvin Kao - San Jose CA, US
Teddy Greer - Fremont CA, US

International Classification:

G06F 13/28
G06F 3/00

US Classification:

710023000, 710005000

Abstract:

An apparatus, system, and method are disclosed for distributed management in a storage system. The invention distributes increasingly complex storage management tasks to a message management module, a drive management module, a cache management module, and an interface management module to control operations of one or more storage devices, without depending on the availability of a “super” microprocessor. Furthermore, the invention provides for efficient inter-module communication through point-to-point passing of asynchronous queued messages and use of a centralized input/output context memory, such that all said modules may work in parallel independently and cooperatively, optimizing storage input/output performance at a reduced cost.