Namespace

Abstract: An operating system which is particularly adapted to heterogenous distributed systems. Entities available to a process running in the operating system are provided by services. Each service models its entity as a set of files. The entity is controlled by performing operations on the set of files provided by the entity. Services other than those provided by the operating system all employ the same protocol specifying operations on files. The only requirement placed on a service by the operating system is that it be able to accept and respond to messages employing the protocol. The files are named, and the operating system provides a plurality of name spaces, relates each process to one of the name spaces, and permits any process to modify its name space or to create a new name space. Services are disclosed which provide each process using the service with its own set of the service's files and which provide files belonging to one process's namespace to another process executing on a different processor.

Abstract: The Namespace Management System comprises a run-time configurable state information management system that evaluates a request within a semantic domain defined by the state information at a given moment in time. The Namespace Management System comprises a Namespace Management application, executing on a computer system that is connected to the Internet or other Autonomous System. The Namespace Management System is programmatically and dynamically configurable to take part in and administer a multiplicity of namespaces, each of which contains listings, data, and services or other state information required to satisfy a request and/or interact with callable services. A multiplicity of Namespace Management Systems can register services, provide services, discover services, communicate with services, and participate in one or more dynamic network namespaces, with each Namespace Management System having at least one associated dynamic network namespace listing. At run-time, a Namespace Management System can register a subscriber's present point of presence to associate with its dynamic network namespace listing. The Namespace Management System provides dynamic point of presence registration for namespace listings and through a scheme handler service to resolve a namespace listing reference, which is given as a Uniform Resource Identifier, to the present point of presence for the namespace listing. This process enables the Namespace Management System to provide web services independent of the physical location of the subscriber.

Abstract: An enterprise namespace may be extended into a cloud of networked resources. A portion of the cloud may be dynamically partitioned, and the extension of the enterprise namespace established within the portion. Cloud resources thus remain as easily accessible to enterprise users as those which are physically located on the enterprise network. Thus, components such as applications, virtual machine instantiations, application states, server states, etc., may be easily migrated between the enterprise network and the cloud.

Abstract: The disclosed embodiments disclose techniques for managing a global namespace for a distributed filesystem. Two or more cloud controllers collectively manage distributed filesystem data that is stored in a cloud storage system; the cloud controllers ensure data consistency for the stored data, and each cloud controller caches portions of the distributed filesystem. Furthermore, a global namespace for the distributed filesystem is also split across these cloud controllers, with each cloud controller “owning” (e.g., managing write accesses for) a distinct portion of the global namespace and maintaining a set of namespace mappings that indicate which portion of the namespace is assigned to each cloud controller. During operation, an initial cloud controller receives a request from a client system to access a target file in the distributed system. This initial cloud controller uses the namespace mappings for the global namespace to determine a preferred cloud controller that will handle the request.