Data replication from one-to-one or one-to-many heterogeneous devices
View Patent ↗Embodiments of the system described herein can be implemented in a software application that runs on a host device or is embedded in a logic or memory device such as a gate array, EEPROM, a control, or dynamical system. The system embodiment allows a set of similar or dissimilar intelligent devices or sensors, which may be interconnected with any type of network or bus, to replicate data between themselves for the purpose of remote backup, redundancy, content distribution, or measurements. The attributes of the data, which may be changed or created on one device or passed through the device, are tracked and journaled in volatile or non-volatile storage in a first phase. This occurs in real-time as the data changes or passes through the device. In a second phase, the attributes that match patterns pre-specified in a configuration are used to decide what changes or the content to replicate to one or more devices. In a third phase, the data is replicated. In practice, the techniques described herein are independent of hardware, operating systems, and applications. The example embodiment is designed to be transparent for system redundancy and error recovery processes such as error correction, retransmission on links, and raid reconfiguration.
1. A method for data replication and content distribution, the method comprising:
accepting a request from a client device to forward data to a second device using a data forwarding operation, the data including data attributes and content;
adding the data attributes of the data to a message queue;
saving the data attributes of the data on a storage device;
determining, based at least in part on the data attributes, what content of the data to forward to the second device;
processing the data attributes concurrently;
forwarding the determined content of the data to the second device, the forwarding including replicating the determined content of the data to the second device using a plurality of parallel replication streams between the client device and the second device to propagate more than one change at a time between the client device and the second device; and
saving a status of the data forwarding operation.
2. The method of claim 1 further comprising communicating the status of the data forwarding operation to the client device that requested the data forwarding operation.
3. The method of claim 1 further comprising performing adaptive compression during the forwarding of the determined content of the data to the second device.
4. The method of claim 1 wherein determining, based at least in part on the data attributes, what content of the data to forward to the second device includes matching the data attributes to patterns.
5. The method of claim 4 wherein the patterns are pre-specified in a configuration.
6. The method of claim 5 wherein the data attributes that match the patterns are used to determine what content of the data to replicate to the second device.
7. The method of claim 1 wherein the client device and the second device are of dissimilar type and architecture.
8. The method of claim 1 wherein replicating the requested data to the second device occurs in real-time.
9. The method of claim 1 wherein replicating the requested data to the second device occurs in near-real-time.
10. The methods of claim 1 further comprising forwarding the requested data to an additional second device.