Patent ID: 7568069
Filing Date: 2009-07-28
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method for creating a large-scale storage array comprising the steps of: creating a plurality of RAID storage volumes, each RAID storage volume of said plurality of RAID storage volumes being made up of a set of physical drives, said set of physical drives comprising at least one physical drive, each RAID storage volume of said plurality of RAID storage volumes having an equivalent number of physical drives in said set of physical drives, and each RAID storage volume of said plurality of RAID storage volumes having equivalent configuration and property settings including RAID level, volume segment size, and volume cache settings, but not including volume label; sequentially numbering each physical drive of said set of physical drives with an individual drive number identifying each physical drive of said set of physical drives starting at a first drive number and sequentially numbering each drive of said set of physical drives until a last drive number is reached, each set of physical drives of each RAID storage volume of said set of RAID storage volumes being sequentially numbered with equivalent drive numbers as other sets of physical drives of other RAID storage volumes such that each set of physical drives of each RAID storage volume of said set of RAID storage volumes is sequentially numbered starting at said first drive number and ending at said last drive number; dividing said plurality of RAID storage volumes into a plurality of storage building blocks with each storage building block of said plurality of storage building blocks comprising an equivalent number of RAID storage volumes, each storage building block of said plurality of storage building blocks being individually addressable as a mid-range storage array, and each storage building block of said plurality of storage building blocks having equivalent configuration and property settings including number of RAID storage volumes, but not including storage building block volume label; combining said plurality of storage building blocks into a storage complex such that said storage complex combination of said plurality of storage building blocks is individually addressable as a single storage system; creating a set of virtual drive clusters such that there is a virtual drive cluster corresponding to each physical drive contained in said set of physical drives and each virtual drive cluster of said set of virtual drive clusters contains each physical drive with an equivalent drive number for each set of physical drives of each RAID storage volume of each storage building block of said plurality of said storage building blocks of said storage complex; physically connecting each storage building block of said plurality of storage building blocks that make up said storage complex to a host computer system; and managing said storage complex using aggregation engine software running on said host computer system such that said storage complex appears as said single storage system to applications running on said host computer system and other computer systems connected to said host computer system and such that said applications running on said host computer system and said other computer systems connected to said host computer system may perform storage management operations on each physical drive contained in a virtual drive cluster selected from said set of virtual drive clusters by performing said storage management operations one time on said selected virtual drive cluster.