Hitachi Assigned Patent

Hitachi Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, has been assigned a patent (8,549,519) developed by Hironori Emaru, Santa Clara, CA, for a “method and apparatus to improve efficiency in the use of resources in data center.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A method of managing use of resources in data center comprises: determining whether first storage subsystem includes a virtual volume or a storage pool that uses a physical volume of second storage subsystem and, if yes, migrating the physical volume to first storage subsystem; determining whether any storage subsystem includes a virtual volume created directly from a physical volume and, if yes, migrating the virtual volume to another virtual volume provisioned from the storage pool of the storage subsystem; and determining whether all virtual volumes satisfy a preset service level objective and, if no, then selecting a VM which has a smallest VM disk file and selecting a storage pool having a largest free space, and then selecting a virtual volume of the storage subsystem which has the selected storage pool and migrating the VM disk file of the selected VM to the selected virtual volume.”

The patent application was filed on Aug. 19, 2011 (13/213,118).