Rackspace Assigned Patent

Rackspace US, Inc., San Antonio, TX has been assigned a patent (8,538,926) developed by six co-inventors for a “massively scalable object storage system for storing object replicas.”

The co-inventors are Michael Barton, Will Reese, San Antonio, TX, John A. Dickinson, Schertz, TX, Jay B. Payne, San Antonio, Charles B. Thier, San Antonio, TX, and Gregory Holt, Hollywood Park, TX.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Several different embodiments of a massively scalable object storage system are described. The object storage system is particularly useful for storage in a cloud computing installation whereby shared servers provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand. In several embodiments, the object storage system includes a ring implementation used to associate object storage commands with particular physical servers such that certain guarantees of consistency, availability, and performance can be met. In other embodiments, the object storage system includes a synchronization protocol used to order operations across a distributed system. In a third set of embodiments, the object storage system includes a metadata management system. In a fourth set of embodiments, the object storage system uses a structured information synchronization system. Features from each set of embodiments can be used to improve the performance and scalability of a cloud computing object storage system.”

The patent application was filed on April 19, 2011 (13/089,442).