Logical view and access to physical storage in modular data and storage management system

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS An exemplary description of the principles according to the present invention may be found in a storage policy where logical data buckets are presented to the end user for directing their data storage operations such as backup and archival.
Storage policy is a logical concept.
Each storage policy comprises one or more copies.
Each copy is a self-contained unit of information.
A primary copy indicates the default destination of storage operations and is tied to a practical set of drives, e.
g.
, physical drives.
Drives are addressed independently of the library or media agent that they are attached to.
Storage policy at the same time comprises of a multiple number of streams which indicate the number of active drives that the storage operation can run against, allowing parallelism in data transfer.
A single copy backup may always be run which transfers data to the primary copy.
The primary copy may then be replicated to the secondary copies or a multiple copy simultaneous backup may be performed.
Each copy could have its destination media type different to allow storage policies to hide media type and related problems in a clean abstract interface.
It also takes care of keeping track of which copy resides where, what is size of each data, etc.
In this manner, the user's data is protected as well as presented in an abstract way using storage policies.
Each of the copies of storage policy could be governed with different aging rules for the application's data.
For example, the primary copy could be targeted to magnetic disc and aged every 30 days and secondary copy could be targeted to tape and aged every year.
Data read operation will always fetch it from the optimal solution for retrieval.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the user just has to define a "Storage Policy" which defines where, how, and the duration the data should be stored at a higher level of abstraction without having to have intimate knowledge of the underlying storage and technology