US Patent 10380026 Generalized storage virtualization interface

A storage system implements a sparse, thinly provisioned logical-to-physical translation layer. The storage system may perform operations to modify logical-to-physical mappings, including creating, removing, and/or modifying any-to-any and/or many-to-one mappings between logical identifiers and stored data (logical manipulation operations). The storage system records persistent metadata to render the logical manipulation (LM) operations persistent and crash-safe. The storage system may provide access to LM functionality through a generalized LM interface. Clients may leverage the LM interface to efficiently implement higher-level functionality and/or offload LM operations to the storage system.