DISTRIBUTED GARBAGE COLLECTION FOR THE DEDUPE STORAGE NETWORK

In the dedupe storage network priority to data replication needs to be given over the garbage collection (GC) activity. For this purpose GC running on any site should not impose any locking on its peer sites for replication. For replication activity GC activity must be completely transparent. In the dedupe storage network, the retention policy of a replicated image is controlled by the site where the image was originated. Distributed GC running on the originating site can only inform the replication sites the list of expired replicated images and cleanup of replicated garbage chunks from its remote FS database for corresponding replication sites. But it cannot cleanup garbage chunks from replication sites. Garbage chunks can only be cleaned by the local GC running on that site.