US 12,438,809 B2
Distributed data storage system with tunneling of management requests among scale-out clusters
Gregory W. Lazar, Upton, MA (US); Vasudevan Subramanian, Chapel Hill, NC (US); Weixing Wang, Durham, NC (US); and Animesh Singh, Bangalore (IN)
Assigned to Dell Products L.P., Round Rock, TX (US)
Filed by Dell Products L.P., Round Rock, TX (US)
Filed on Jul. 25, 2023, as Appl. No. 18/225,787.
Prior Publication US 2025/0039087 A1, Jan. 30, 2025
Int. Cl. H04L 45/741 (2022.01); G06F 11/14 (2006.01); H04L 45/745 (2022.01)
CPC H04L 45/741 (2013.01) [G06F 11/1464 (2013.01); H04L 45/745 (2013.01)] 14 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A distributed data storage system comprising a plurality of clusters of data storage appliances, wherein:
the clusters are interconnected by an inter-cluster (IC) network having an associated IC namespace,
the data storage appliances include (1) respective storage devices providing persistent secondary data storage and (2) respective internal structure including front-end interface circuitry for interfacing to host computers, back-end interface circuitry for interfacing to the storage devices, and storage processing circuitry including respective storage processing (SP) nodes, the SP nodes of the data storage appliances being configured and operative to exchange management traffic using respective mesh network (MN) addresses defined in an MN namespace and not routable in the IC network, and
the clusters include respective gateway devices being co-configured and co-operative to provide IC tunnels among the clusters using network addresses of the IC namespace and to route the management traffic among the clusters using the IC tunnels, by, in each gateway device for management traffic received from a local SP node destined for a remote SP node of another cluster, (1) performing a routing check based on a routing rule associating a valid MN-namespace destination address with a dummy MN-namespace address further associated with a respective IC tunnel, (2) applying a tunnel configuration rule of the IC tunnel associating the valid MN-namespace destination address with the IC-namespace network address of a remote gateway device via which the remote SP is reached, and (3) forwarding the received traffic on the respective IC tunnel using the IC-namespace network address of the remote gateway device,
wherein the clusters are located at respective geographically separated sites, and the management traffic is traffic for a disaster recovery protection scheme implemented between the sites,
and wherein the IC tunnel is realized as an Internet Protocol Security (IPSEC) tunnel, and wherein each gateway device is further configured and operative to provide one or more additional IPSEC functions in connection with the IPSEC tunnel, the functions selected from encryption and endpoint authentication.