Patent ID: 7603532

Claim:
A method for reclaiming unused space from a data container served by a storage system, comprising: maintaining a client computer interacting with the storage system; maintaining the data container by the storage system; executing on the client computer a computer program which stores data by writing the data to a file system on the client computer and to the data container of the storage system, the client computer program also freeing blocks on the client computer to create one or more freed blocks, the client computer program not informing the storage system that the one or more freed blocks were freed on the file system of the client computer; executing an agent on the client computer, the agent examining metadata of the file system on the client computer to detect the one or more freed blocks; sending, by the agent, a punch hole command to the storage system, the punch hole command having an operation code field, a number of ranges field and one or more range identifier fields which identify the one or more freed blocks; and deallocating by the storage system, in response to receiving the punch hole command, blocks on the data container of the storage system which correspond to the one or more freed blocks that were freed on the client computer by the client computer program.