Patent ID: 11907410
Assignee: EMC IP HOLDING COMPANY LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G  H

Claim 10:
11. A storage system, comprising control circuitry that includes a set of processing units coupled to memory, the control circuitry constructed and arranged to:
provide a plurality of slices of continuously-addressable storage space, the slices having uniform size and constructed from a set of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) arrays;
create allocation metadata that specifies mappings between the plurality of slices and respective ranges within a sparse volume of a support layer, the allocation metadata enabling the slices to be located in response to data access requests corresponding to the respective ranges of the sparse volume; and
protect data stored in the plurality of slices by encrypting the allocation metadata, said encrypting preventing data access to the slices and user data stored therein unless an encryption key is provided,
wherein the storage system includes a file-system layer, wherein the control circuitry is further constructed and arranged to store file-system-mapping metadata between a file in the file system layer and the support layer, the file-system-mapping metadata being finer-grained than the allocation metadata, and wherein the control circuitry is constructed and arranged to protect the data stored in the plurality of slices without encrypting the file-system-mapping metadata.