Patent ID: 9344235
Filing Date: 2016-05-17
CPC Classification: G06F,H04L

Claim Text:
1. A method for managing virtual volumes, the method comprising: defining a storage pool to which one or more physical storage devices is assigned by selection from a plurality of available physical storage devices, the assigned physical storage devices having a total logical size; defining virtual volumes that are associated to the storage pool; presenting the virtual volumes to one or more client devices, wherein the virtual volumes have respective logical sizes, and the sum of the logical sizes for the virtual volumes intentionally exceeds the total logical size of the assigned physical storage devices, and wherein the virtual volumes are presented to the client devices without requiring the assigned physical storage devices to have been previously presented to any of the client devices; defining the storage pool to include a plurality of available chunks each having a chunk size, the chunk size differing from and being larger than a block size used for basic write requests received from the client devices for the virtual volumes, the defining of the storage pool to include the plurality of available chunks occurring separately from the presenting of the virtual volumes to the client devices; and allocating physical chunks of the chunk size from the plurality of available chunks that are included in the storage pool to dynamically allocate physical resources to the virtual volumes on demand; wherein managing the virtual volumes is performed independently of the client devices.