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

Claim 11:
12. A computer program product including a set of non-transitory, computer-readable media having instructions which, when executed by control circuitry of a storage system, cause the storage system to perform a method, comprising:
providing a plurality of slices representing respective extents of continuously-addressable storage space, the slices having uniform size and constructed from a set of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) arrays;
creating 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
protecting 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 method further comprises storing 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 protecting the data stored in the plurality of slices is performed without encrypting the file-system-mapping metadata.