DISCOVERY CONTROLLER-BASED NONVOLATILE MEMORY EXPRESS NAMESPACE RESOLUTION SERVICES: abstract simplified (17714154)

• This abstract for appeared for patent application number 17714154 Titled 'DISCOVERY CONTROLLER-BASED NONVOLATILE MEMORY EXPRESS NAMESPACE RESOLUTION SERVICES'

Simplified Explanation

The abstract explains that currently there is no efficient way to locate a specific storage area on an NVMe-oF fabric. This means that a host computer needs to be configured with specific information about the storage system in order to access it, or it needs to go through a lengthy and computationally expensive process to discover and access all available storage areas. The embodiments described in the abstract propose a discovery controller that can help a host computer efficiently locate and access a specific storage area by resolving its identifier to the corresponding port(s) on the storage system.

Original Abstract Submitted

Currently, there is no scalable methodologies defined to locate a namespace on an NVMe-oF fabric. Therefore, it is necessary to configure a host with the NVMe™ Qualified Name (NQN) and transport information of the storage subsystem where the boot namespace is located or discover and enumerate all namespaces available to the host on an NVMe-oF fabric. With the current protocols, a host may need to perform many operations to locate the proper namespace and boot from the NVMe-oF fabric, making booting in a SAN environment an extremely slow operation and computationally expensive process. Embodiments herein support discovery, via a discovery controller, to provide a namespace resolution service able to facilitate a host to efficiently resolve a given namespace identifier to the corresponding subsystem port(s) through which that namespace is accessible.