Patent ID: 7561589
Filing Date: 2009-07-14
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method for accessing storage, the method comprising: maintaining, by one or more processing elements, a plurality of storage segments linked together in a linked list data structure to represent a virtual contiguous block of storage to be accessed based on a virtual address within an address space corresponding to the virtual contiguous block of storage; maintaining, by said one or more processing elements, a plurality of virtual address to corresponding data segment pointer associations for directly identifying a data segment corresponding to a particular address within the address space, said associations including a plurality of dynamic recently used associations; and in response to an identified address in the address space: performing a lookup operation, based on the identified address, in the plurality of virtual address to corresponding data segment pointer association, the lookup operation designed to evaluate the plurality of dynamic recently used associations to identify a closest data segment pointer to a data segment which is closest, but prior in said linked list of the linked list data structure, to a particular data segment corresponding to the identified address; traversing the linked list data structure from the storage segment identified by the closest data segment pointer to the particular data segment; accessing data in the particular data segment; and updating, by said one or more processing elements, an association in the plurality of dynamic recently used associations to reflect said accessing data.