Six New Patents for Dot Hill

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has recently granted four and allowed two patents pertaining to Dot Hill’s line of RAID storage systems employing the company’s innovative R/Evolution Architecture.
 
These unique technologies, developed by Dot Hill’s engineering team at the company’s Longmont, Colo. technology center, are part of Dot Hill’s growing patent portfolio which enables the company to continue to provide unique products to a growing list of OEM customers. To date, the company has been awarded 42 patents.
 
The newest patents granted to Dot Hill include:

1. [Issued 2/3/09] U.S. patent 7,487,391 Storage Controller Super Capacitor Adaptive Life Monitor — This innovation uses repeated operating voltage and operating temperature measurements to predict the remaining lifetime of a super capacitor pack in-circuit. This makes it possible to extend the life span of the super capacitor and guarantee safe backup of the write cache in the event of a power failure.
2. [Issued 11/11/08] U.S. Patent 7,451,348 Storage Controller Dynamic Cache Size Adjustment Based on Super Capacitor Capacity.  This invention optimizes the life span and efficiency of super capacitor energy storage devices when used with write-caching storage controllers by dynamically reducing the super capacitor operating voltage if the amount of data to be backed up by the super capacitor is reduced. The CPU of the storage controller continuously estimates the required energy based on operational temperature and voltage history for the super capacitor device as well as the warranted lifetime. This patent optimizes super capacitor usage in storage controller applications, resulting in longer super capacitor life and lower energy usage requirements by super capacitor-based storage systems.
3. [Issued 12/9/08] U.S. patent 7,464,214 Application Server Blade for Embedded Storage Appliance — This network storage appliance patent provides a hot-pluggable server blade that interfaces with a storage controller in the network storage appliance chassis. A portion of the storage controller is physically resident on the server blade, and provides efficient translation between the server and the rest of the storage controller. This makes it possible to efficiently package redundant servers and storage controllers in a single high performance network storage appliance.
4.  [Issued 12/9/08] U.S. patent 7,464,205 Application Server Blade for Embedded Storage Appliance — This invention provides a method of efficiently transferring data within a network storage appliance. Redundant servers within the network storage appliance transfer data packets to a storage controller within the network storage appliance chassis, where a portion of the storage controller is on the same server blade as each of the redundant servers. Forwarding data through a portion of a storage controller allows the network storage appliance to take advantage of a  backplane-based local bus architecture for high data throughput.
5. [Allowed 12/17/08] U.S. patent application publication US 2005/0102549 A1 Network Storage Appliance with an Integrated Switch — This patent pertains to a network storage appliance that includes one or more integrated switching devices. The integrated switching devices include many I/O ports and a data transfer path between each of the I/O ports for providing simultaneous data transfers between multiple pairs. The switches enable the appliance to simultaneously transfer frames between its I/O ports and storage device I/O ports and/or host I/O ports, thereby providing increased data transfer bandwidth.
6. [Allowed 12/31/08] U. S. patent application publication US 2006/0212651 A1 Mass Storage Controller with Apparatus and Method for Extending Battery Backup Time by Selectively Providing Battery Power to Volatile Memory banks Not Storing Critical Data — This invention improves storage controller battery life and increases the likelihood that critical cache data will be supplied with battery power in the event of an extended main power loss. When the controller detects a loss of main power, the controller causes the critical memory banks to receive battery power, but disables battery power to the non-critical memory banks in order to extend the length of time the critical memory banks can continue to receive battery power to reduce the likelihood of data loss.

“This latest round of additions to our patent portfolio illustrates the contributions of a veteran engineering team that continues to find new ways to differentiate our products and provide our OEM customers with a competitive advantage,” said Jim Kuenzel, senior vice president of Engineering for Dot Hill. “These innovations support Dot Hill’s leadership in battery elimination, or life extension, implemented as part of our EcoStor initiative. The ability to provide increased performance is also greatly enhanced through fundamental improvements in high speed storage switching technology.”
 
Dot Hill R/Evolution Storage Architecture
Gives OEMs a Competitive Advantage
The highly modular, highly dynamic Dot Hill R/Evolution Architecture is designed to rapidly evolve and support OEM technology, enabling OEMs to quickly achieve sustainable competitive advantage in the volume storage market. The R/Evolution Architecture delivers the high levels of performance, storage density, time-to-market leadership and — most importantly — configuration flexibility required by volume storage customers. Using modular and bladed components, the R/Evolution Architecture and EcoStor battery elimination technology provides OEMs with an environmentally friendly "configure-to-product" model (not just ‘configure-to-order’) that lets them customize volume storage market solutions quickly, easily and precisely. This unique model revolutionizes how OEMs bring storage products to market by ensuring opportunities for product differentiation, even between different companies that simultaneously OEM products from Dot Hill.